Baby Makes Three
by TB's LMC
Summary: Danny should've known better than to go on yet another hike with his partner…only this time, there's more than just a dead body to worry about. And way more than a broken arm. There's going to be bromance, hurt, comfort, friendship, team, mystery, action and you could probably even call it a casefic when all is said and done. Oh, and there's a baby.
1. Chapter 1

_Summary: Danny should've known better than to go on yet another hike with his partner…only this time, there's more than just a dead body to worry about. And way more than a broken arm._

_Acknowledgment: Based on simple sentence uttered by my publisher, which was: "Danny and Steve stuck in the jungle with a baby, but with Danny unable to take care of it." My mind conjured up this little tale as a result._

* * *

**BABY MAKES THREE**

* * *

Steve had urged him to go on yet another hike, this time promising he wouldn't fall over a cliff. They weren't even going to the same place, nowhere near the petroglyphs that Danny were sure said something like, "This is where Steve almost died" at this point.

So against his better judgment, Danny acquiesced. Because if he didn't, Steve would look at him like a kid who's just been denied his favorite toy for no good reason at all, and Danny _hated_ it when Steve's puppy dog eyes rivaled that of Danny's eleven-year old daughter.

"It's Kaliuwa'a Falls, Danny. My…my mom used to like going there. She'd hike us kids back whether Dad came or not, sometimes with a couple of her friends." Steve smiled ruefully. "Most of the time I was the only male in the group."

"Tell me the cougars didn't fall all over you when you were a teenager like every woman alive does now," Danny zinged at him.

Steve cocked his head. "You have an overactive imagination." But then he rubbed the back of his neck, looked away, even bit his lower lip.

"Oh, all _right_. Against my better judgment, because apparently I've turned into a shadow of you, I will go with you to this…what'd you call it?"

"Kaliuwa'a Falls. It's eleven hundred feet total, but the last eighty-foot drop leads to a nice pool. I don't think too many people know how to get there anymore."

"But _you_ know."

"Of course."

"And does it involve swinging from jungle vines or crossing white-water rapids or parachuting in from twenty thousand feet?"

Steve burst out laughing. "None of the above. Just wear shorts or something like that, though, because it's really humid under the canopy."

Danny sighed and shook his head. "I prefer a canopy of stars, where you won't have huge bugs dropping on you or wild boar pounding after you."

"Duly noted," Steve said very seriously with a nod. "Will you be ready to go by ten?"

"Ten? Tonight or tomorrow morning? What happened to six? What happened to waking up too damn early on weekends?"

Steve raised an eyebrow. "Do you _want_ me to pick you up at six tomorrow morning?"

"No," Danny scowled.

"Then why the hell are you complaining about ten?" Steve asked, somehow managing to sound both exasperated and fond.

"Someone has to push back on you, Steven, because if they don't, you think you can just run ramshod all over their lives and carry them around in your pocket like your newest and most favorite grenade."

Steve crossed his arms over his chest, standing in between the Camaro and his truck in the Iolani Palace's parking lot. "Did you just equate yourself to my favorite grenade? Does that mean you want a special spot in my cargo pants?"

Danny set his jaw and made to stomp from the driver's side of his car over to where Steve was, to hit him or maybe just curse at him, but Steve just laughed, jumped in his truck and started the engine as he rolled the window down. "You are too _easy_!" he crowed.

"I take it back!" Danny yelled as Steve backed out of his spot. "I am _not_ going with you tomorrow!"

"Of course you, are, Danno," Steve replied smugly, then needlessly burned rubber out of the parking lot.

Danny watched him go, fuming for all of maybe ten seconds until Steve pulled out into traffic, and then shaking his head and chuckling.

Yeah, at first Danny's ranting and railing against anything Steve-related had been his anger over his general life and Steve's strange way of existing. But now, it was just something he kept doing; a good way to blow off steam even though after three years he'd realized Steve wasn't _actually_ insane…just an overgrown Boy Scout with an adrenaline and leaping-tall-shipping-containers addiction, a BAMF Navy SEAL mentality and a penchant for thigh holsters and all things explosive.

Danny sighed and rubbed a hand on his forehead as he made for the driver's side of his car. "That man will be the death of me one day, I'm sure of it."

* * *

Aside from his usual bitching about being in a jungle-like forest of any kind, which Steve alternately grinned and frowned at, Danny wasn't really having that bad a time, Steve thought. He was keeping up easily, seemed to be in a good mood overall, and was actually taking some interest in this or that thing Steve pointed out to him along the way.

They'd moved from the more touristy parts of this particular park, where easily identifiable dirt pathways and wooden staircases make it clear and easy going, into an area where less people go because most didn't know there was anything but canopy beyond where the dirt trail ends.

But Steve _did_ know, and hadn't been to see this spot since the last time he'd come with his sister, his mother and her friends four months before his mom had left them the first time. Steve clamped down hard on that thought, refusing to think any further about his mother, Joe White or what had happened in the year since he'd discovered she wasn't dead after all.

Instead, he focused on the day ahead and admitted to himself that he was really gung-ho for Danny to see this particular spot, because he knew not even Danny's admittedly decreasing Jersey snark could possibly have a bad thing to say about the falls.

So he was cheerful, feeling good over being outdoors and getting all this exercise, and just plain happy to spend some time with his best friend. Time that didn't involve Kevlar vests, gunfire or high-speed car chases. "Just a few more minutes," he said with a grin. "Then you'll see something spectacular."

Danny hmmm'd and continued to follow even when they crossed a tricky part of a stream that stood between them and the sheer magnificence of Hawaii. At last the sound of Kaliuwa'a Falls could be heard and Danny's eyes widened. Steve grinned.

"Is that what I think it is?"

"Most likely," Steve nodded as they pushed their way through the undergrowth.

"No near-drownings, please," Danny said. "And no cliff-diving."

"Aw, Danny, you're no fun."

"No. I am not. I am a killjoy and make no apologies for it," Danny replied, but Steve could hear the grin in his voice. "I prefer that each and every limb remain attached in the manner it's meant to be, and am adverse to head injuries, drowning and broken bones, not necessarily in that order."

Steve stopped, turned round, looked at Danny and chuckled.

"What's with the laugh, McGarrett?" Danny asked as he ducked, weaved and followed Steve's every step when the taller man turned and kept going. "Do I amuse you? Is that why you wanted me as your partner, because I tickle your funny bone?"

"You're a funny guy, Danno. It's a thing. Go with it."

"A thing, he says. You do realize that at this point in our partnership we have more 'things' going on between us than your average pair of friends, right?"

"Makes it exciting, Danny," Steve replied, thwacking at a huge leaf and holding it out of the way as he gestured for Danny to go on ahead. "This way we'll never get bored with each other."

"I don't know about you," Danny stated while Steve took the lead again, "but I'd be perfectly happy to be bored around you at least four out of seven days a week. See, I don't ask for much, only what's reasonable in an attempt to ensure my longevity. This penchant you have for freefalling, speed racing and getting us shot at is disturbing and my blood pressure has its own opinion on the matter."

"Us? You said us."

"What?"

"You said us! Getting _us_ shot at!" Steve exclaimed, turning around and pointing at Danny, which effectively stopped them both in their tracks. Danny grabbed his finger, scowling mightily. "You said 'us' instead of 'getting _me_ shot at' like you usually do!" Steve yanked his finger out of Danny's grasp, held both hands over his heart and swooned dramatically. "Oh, I think I'm in _love_!"

"Shut up, you," Danny growled, manhandling his partner to turn him around, giving him a hard push in the back to resume walking, even as Steve started to laugh. And Steve could hear the laughter hiding behind Danny's grumbling as they continued on their way.

Suddenly Steve pushed through a final wall of undergrowth and onto a one-foot slope of land at the edge of a good-sized natural pool fed by the falls, that in turn fed the stream they'd crossed earlier. He stopped so quickly that Danny ran right into his back, yelped, and scrambled sideways even as Steve very nearly lost his balance.

"_Warn_ a guy, _would_ you?" Danny yelled, hands flailing. "Christ, you are trying to _kill_ me!"

Steve raised a finger in the air to point out "I think I'm the one who almost tumbled into the water, partner, so in essence, I'm either trying to kill my_self_, or _you're_ trying to kill _me_. Besides, I might've hit my head, but that's all. This water's barely a foot deep near the edge. It's only in the center that it's deep enough to submerge."

Danny opened his mouth to reply, but the eighty-foot top of the first level of Kaliuwa'a Falls caught his eye and he glanced sharply up at it from their spot on the opposite bank. "Holy _shit_!" Danny cried, and without another word ran into the pool, tripping over rocks, jungle detritus and his own feet before plunging into the deeper part near the center.

"Danny, what—?" But then Steve looked up, too, and what he saw shocked the hell out of him. There, standing half in the falls where they tipped over the edge of the cliff and half on the narrow shelf of rock next to it was a man who'd just dropped something over the side. Something that was shaped like a baby carrier, and that was emitting a wailing sound. That sound could only mean one thing. "Son of a _bitch_!" Steve yelled, dropping his backpack to the ground and getting his weapon out. He looked back up, saw the man staring down at him, pointed his weapon and yelled as loudly as he could, "Five-0! Stay right there!"

Which, of course, the man didn't. Steve heard a thunk, then a plop, then a litany of curses, and ran into the pool after his partner, diving through the deeper part and coming up quickly as it grew rocky and shallow again near where the falls dropped in. Danny was now sitting on his ass in about half a foot of water, rocking a bit and moaning in pain. It wasn't until Steve was towering over him that he discovered what Danny's torso had kept hidden from view.

It was a baby carrier. And inside that baby carrier was a tiny baby dressed all in pale blue. Steve didn't know a whole shitload about babies, but this one looked _small_…as small as Rachel's baby had been when Steve had seen him through the nursery window.

"Ohmagod, Danny, are you—?"

"Fine," Danny gritted out between clenched teeth. "Go get that motherfucker." He looked up at Steve, eyes flashing with anger. "_Nobody_ does that to a baby."

Steve nodded once, looked in a three-sixty around them, and decided his best bet was to return to the trail and veer off into the overgrowth, climbing parallel to the eighty-foot drop until he reached its zenith. He hoped that since his quarry had actually been standing _in_ the falls, that he'd have a hard time getting out of the deep gully they flowed through. This would allow Steve to catch up to him and maybe drop _him_ over the edge.

Hey, when the life of a child was involved, Steve knew damn well that even _Danny_ wouldn't give him shit if he did.

Steve's mind raced as he ran, shoving his way through plants and trees. He simply couldn't believe what he'd seen. Why would _any_one drop a child over a fucking _water_fall?

That child owed his or her life to Danny. Danny, who had – somehow – actually _caught_ the kid, carrier and all.

* * *

Danny's left hand skimmed over the infant strapped into the car seat, touching first around his skull, then along his neck, shoulders, arms, chest and stomach. From the color of the baby's onesie, he guessed it might be a boy, but you never knew these days, what with the equality of genders always in play. The baby seemed totally fine, wasn't crying and even cooed a little at him when Danny stroked his cheek.

"What the hell," Danny breathed, then gasped as a jolt of pain went through his right side. He looked down and saw the water around where he was sitting starting to turn red. "Shit." He moved just a little and the jab of pain seared through him again, taking his breath away. He had to get this baby out of the water, though, because mist from the falls was wetting them both, and no infant this young could keep its body heat up with that coolness soaking them. "Hang on a sec, little guy, and I apologize in advance for my language," Danny said.

He squeezed his eyes closed, gathered up his reserve of courage and all his strength, and sprang to his feet. The resulting roar of pain he let loose was followed by words he didn't think he'd spoken since the last time he was _shot_. He swayed unsteadily, but the thought of the infant made him force himself to open his eyes and take enough deep breaths to keep his vision from whiting out.

Holy _fuck_, did it hurt. Just…holy _fuck_.

He wasn't sure what exactly had happened. One minute he'd seen a man at the top of the falls holding a baby carrier out over the small pond, and the next minute he'd seen the carrier falling and rushed to get beneath it. He'd caught it, the momentum knocking him on his ass. At that same moment he'd felt something on his right side like a knife through the arm and ribs. And right now he couldn't twist his body well enough to see what had happened to either spot on him, especially with his arm hanging limply at his side and refusing to move.

So Danny, with his two perfectly good legs and his one good arm, picked up the baby carrier by its handle, grimaced at the pain that movement caused, and made his way very slowly to a large cluster of moss-covered rocks on the opposite bank from where he and Steve had come in. That ten-foot walk exhausted him, and he knew from the slight wooziness he was feeling that he was losing some blood, albeit slowly enough that it wasn't turning the entire pool red.

He slipped a couple of times on the rocks as he made his way on-shore, crying out both times but managing not to either drop the baby carrier or slam it down onto the rocks and jar the baby within. Eventually he reached a dryer area where low grass and smaller plants marked re-entry to the forest proper. Hardly able to breathe past the constant ache in his right side, Danny set the carrier down a foot back from the last of the rocks and collapsed to his knees.

The movement jarred his whole body and he whimpered, tears leaking out the corners of his eyes. Goddammit, he wished he could figure out what precisely had happened to his side and arm. That he couldn't move the arm was enough to scare even _him_, because what the hell would paralyze his _arm_? And his side must have been what was leaking blood…confirmed when Danny managed to flatten the palm of his left hand at the front edge of his right side and pulled it away to find it covered in blood.

He wiped the blood off on his shorts as best he could, then noticed the infant was watching him with wide eyes. "Hey," Danny whispered, unable to muster enough oomph to speak louder. "You okay there, buddy?"

The baby squirmed, one tiny fist reaching up into the air. Danny didn't want to touch the boy with a hand covered in blood, so he just shook his head. "Not…right now…okay?" he panted, feeling his resolve to stay up on his knees start to wane. "I just…I gotta…"

And then a veil of darkness descended over his eyes. Danny was unconscious before his head hit the jungle floor.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve cursed himself, cursed the man he'd failed to apprehend and then cursed himself some more. Dammit, he was _trained_ for shit like this! So how had the guy so easily been able to evade him? He kept his eyes and ears open as he made his way quickly back down toward the base of the falls to see how Danny was faring.

It wasn't lost on Steve that not only had he not caught the bastard who'd dropped the baby, but he'd also left his partner in obvious pain alone with said baby. And while of the two of them, Danny was far more experienced in matters of all things Infant, the fact that Steve didn't know whether Danny had just busted a finger catching the carrier, or whether he'd somehow gotten himself more seriously injured than that in the act of doing so, weighed heavily on his mind.

As the sound of the falls became closer, he made himself go even faster. He wasn't going to call out, in case the man who'd dropped the baby was nearby and armed. No reason to let him know that Danny, the baby and Steve were all still in that area. He just hoped like hell Danny was okay, because if he wasn't…Steve shuddered. They were a long, long way from ground help. And that meant if anyone _did_ need immediate rescuing, it was going to be the petroglyph site all over again.

Danny was going to hate him, injured or not. He was going to go on loudly and at great length about any time you crossed Steve with Hiking, someone got hurt. Although, Steve thought in his defense, they _had_ saved the life of a tiny little baby. If they hadn't been there at the exact moment they were, that infant would've either been killed when it hit the rocks, or drowned as it went into the falls' pool.

So that was the argument he clung to as he raced back to the pool in question. If Danny gave him shit, he'd say, "Hey, we saved a kid's life, Danno, it's all good." And Danny wouldn't be able to argue with that.

Steve huffed out a laugh in spite of himself. This was _Danny_ he was talking about, after all. He could – and would – argue about _any_thing.

When at last Steve made it to the same spot where Danny had barreled into him and nearly knocked him into the water, the first thing he noticed was that his backpack wasn't where he'd dropped it. His first thought was that meant Danny had it, which meant Danny wasn't as injured as it'd seemed in the blur of Steve taking off after the man who'd dropped the baby.

But then Steve looked up across the pond, and for a nanosecond he froze, unwilling to believe what he was seeing.

"_Danny!_" he yelled.

Steve half-ran, half-waded through this slightly more shallow part of the pond further from the bottom of the falls, made his way up over the rocks and fell to his knees beside his partner. His partner whose eyes were closed, whose right side was covered in blood, and who was far too pale for a guy who'd been lying under the bright Hawaiian sun for three-quarters of an hour.

"No no no _no_!" Steve barked, glancing up to find the infant looking asleep in his carrier, the shadow of a large nearby tree keeping him shaded. "Come on, Danny! Wake up for me, bro."

Steve felt Danny's pulse which, in spite of how he looked, was fairly strong, but far too fast for his liking. He forced Danny's eyelids open one at a time, and when the sun hit the pupils, they contracted. Okay, no concussion. So he turned his attention to Danny's right arm, which was twisted in a way Steve knew meant his forearm was busted. "Shit," he breathed, but then realized that the skin of the arm wasn't broken…which meant all that blood was coming from somewhere else.

First thing he had to do was splint that arm, or he could ruin it beyond repair trying to move it away from Danny's side. So he moved over, checked the baby's pulse by touching his carotid area gently, and found it to be nice and strong. He smiled down at the kid briefly, then ran and waded back across the pool to look for his backpack. Up and down the shore he scanned, but it was nowhere to be found.

He got out of the pool and pushed further back into the jungle along either side of the overgrown trail they'd used to get to the falls, but once again, no sign of the backpack. Dammit, that had had everything in it, from Danny's sidearm to four huge bottles of water to the first aid kit and satellite phone, and everything else Steve had packed for their day out.

Well, for now, Steve would have to make do with what Nature provided. So he slipped into the thicker portion of the jungle, reached into his shorts pocket and pulled out his knife. Danny could make fun of his "BAMF Army Tendencies" all he wanted, but right now Steve was grateful he at least hadn't emptied his pockets completely for this outing, no matter how much teasing Danny had done when he'd spotted multiple bulges in the pockets of Steve's cargo shorts.

Not five minutes later, Steve had two good, straight, pieces of _kōlea lau nui_ wood in-hand, two parts of the multi-stem trunk of a common Hawaiian tree that measured four inches in diameter. He'd use them on Danny's arm top and bottom, then use the six quarter-inch thick collection of vines in his other hand to secure them. That out of the way, he would then see where the hell the blood that had soaked Danny's shirt and the top right side of his shorts, was coming from.

When he got back to them, the baby was awake and mewling a little, but not actually full-out crying. _Thank God_, Steve thought, because there was no way he could quiet the kid right now. Not that Danny could either, unless he magically produced a baby bottle from somewhere. And that was something even a fully-loaded ready-for-action Steve McGarrett didn't carry in any of his pockets.

Steve ignored the kid for the moment, focused on straightening his partner's right forearm as much as he could, pressing deeply to try and feel where the bone was. It seemed like a clean break, which would make it easy for the doctors to set as long as Danny didn't jostle it, and it didn't cut into an artery or vein, or slice through nerves. Steve held his hands steady as he worked, finally getting the arm the way he wanted it, placing the thin tree trunks against the soft flesh on the inside of it, and the hairier outer portion of Danny's arm.

Carefully he wound the vines around and around and around until there was barely any flesh still visible through them. He secured the tail-end of the last vine by tying it off through another that was already wound around the arm, then tested the field dressing by lifting Danny's hand into the air. He noted that his forearm stayed straight and didn't seem to move at all.

Satisfied with this work, he lifted the arm forward and gently placed Danny's hand down on the ground in front of his abdomen so he could see what was causing the blood loss. He scowled when he made to lift the pale blue tee shirt Danny had worn. The blood was still wet enough to make the shirt heavy in his hand, but felt tacky against his fingertips as he pulled it away from Danny's skin and pushed it up far enough that it would stay, tucked under Danny's armpit.

And Steve, as many different types of injuries as he'd seen on missions, during his time as Task Force Leader in Hawaii and in training videos during his early days with the SEALs, well…none of those prepared him for this. First and foremost, of course, because this wound was on his best friend. But secondly, because whatever Danny had done to get himself and that infant these ten feet away from where he'd caught the carrier to begin with, had made the initial wound a whole helluva lot worse.

Because what was sticking out of Danny wasn't a knife or anything modern that he might've faced in a fight with a fleeing suspect. It wasn't a sharpened rock or any kind of tree branch. It was something that Steve had only ever seen in museums, and displayed on one wall of his friend Mamo's humble abode. In his side, Danny had the head of a _pike_ embedded. Steve could not believe his eyes, and blinked rapidly trying to force himself _not_ to see what he was seeing.

A four-inch long spiked _pike_ tip was sticking out of Danny's right-side abdominal area. Normally found at the end of a twelve to fifteen-foot hand-hewn pole, this weapon had been used by ancient Hawaiians in battle, with this particular form of _pololu_, or spear, being the type that did the most silent damage.

The small sharks' teeth attached to the smooth wood broke off once the spear penetrated the body cavity, and any movement continued to damage the tissue and organs surrounding the entry point even if the tip was pulled out of the victim. This had led to many, many deaths that occurred well after battles were over, leading to at least a dozen legends about native Hawaiians placing curses on marauders and invaders that killed them, even when the Hawaiians were nowhere near.

And now Danny had that inside him. The thing that got Steve was that the piece didn't look old at all. So it couldn't possibly have been an artifact, or it would've been much dirtier and probably more worn from handling or the elements. It also, though, didn't look like it'd ever actually been attached to a full _pike_, because the tail end of the spear was smooth and flat, rather than looking like it'd been broken off.

Besides, if Danny had been stabbed with that thing, if anyone had actually thrown a fifteen-foot long spear at his partner as Danny ran to try and catch the baby, Steve would've seen it. So how had it gotten into him, then, and _under _his shirt, to boot? Was this some new kind of weapon based on the Old Ways? Maybe something that was shot out of a crossbow-like contraption, or an advanced slingshot? Danny's up-stretched arms had lifted his shirt at the exact moment the _pike_ tip reached him?

Well, however it had gotten _into_ Danny, the thing Steve had to do now was get it _out_ of him. And see if he could determine how many sharks' teeth – if they were even real ones – remained inside Danny's body. Had to get the bleeding to stop, had to get Danny awake and mobile…and had to try and find his goddamn backpack.

The thought of his missing backpack, as he leaned down close enough to inspect the half-spearhead sticking out of Danny's side more clearly, made Steve's hairs stand on end. If it wasn't where Steve had dropped it, and it was nowhere near Danny, meaning his partner hadn't picked it up and moved it, then someone else had taken it. Which meant they now had a loaded HPD issue firearm, Danny's and Steve's Five-0 badges, all the supplies Steve had packed and the satellite phone along with their cell phones.

Steve listened very, very carefully to the sounds of the forest around them. He heard nothing unnatural or out of place. But that didn't mean anything. All told, he'd been away from Danny and the baby for nearly fifty minutes. Anything could have happened. Neither had been killed, so that was a good sign that they might be left alone. Still, that didn't mean jack. Steve had been on too many covert ops to think otherwise.

The only way to get the spearhead out was to pull. He risked tearing more of Danny's skin, more of the flesh beneath, whatever muscle it may have already pierced. But he couldn't leave it in. It was no-win either way, so Steve found himself faced with the same type of decision he'd been having to make as a leader since Hell Week was over: a goddamn difficult one.

He couldn't use the water in the pool to help cleanse anything because of leptospirosis bacteria present in all Hawaii's freshwater. Get that into Danny's wound and he might just as well sign his partner's death warrant. So water aside, all he had left was his own saliva in terms of anything nearby, and there was no way he could produce enough to cleanse the wound as much as would make him happy.

He rocked back on his heels, still in his crouch, palm pressed flat over Danny's ribcage between the wound and the rucked-up tee shirt, like he needed the contact to ground himself…and maybe he did. Steve closed his eyes and pulled on every piece of information he had at his disposal about the jungle forest surrounding them and field first aid training from his Navy days. "Ulu," he breathed, eyes snapping open. He pushed himself up to his full height and looked all around them. He'd seen some ulu, or breadfruit trees, about half a mile back. He looked down at Danny, then over at the baby who was, strangely enough, actually sleeping again.

At least, Steve _hoped_ it was sleeping. He reached down, pressed his index finger to the infant's neck, and breathed a sigh of relief when he discovered the baby was, in fact, still very much alive. "Quietest kid ever," Steve observed as he bit his lip. If he ran back the half mile to get sap from the breadfruit tree, that left the infant and Danny here completely helpless. The maniac who'd dropped the baby over the side of the falls could very well still be around, and Steve had to assume he was most definitely now armed. So that was a chance Steve couldn't take.

Which meant he had to take Danny and the baby _with_ him.

He could do this.

Yeah. He could do this.

He _had_ to.

Steve set his jaw, squared his shoulders and began working out in his mind the best way to carry them both. Because he didn't want to live in a world where he was directly responsible for the death of a little baby. Nor in one where Danno didn't live to rub in the outcome of their second hiking experience together for the next fifty years.

Sometimes, with Danny Williams as a partner and friend, three years seemed like three hundred. But the truth was, for Steve at least, it wasn't _nearly _long enough yet.


	3. Chapter 3

It was nearing two o'clock in the afternoon, and Chin was just finishing the last coat of paint in his and Malia's bedroom. They'd decided their permanent home would be Chin's place, but it meant some remodeling in order to make Malia happy. And Chin was enjoying every second of it.

Her tastes had always mirrored his own, anyway. As a single guy working random security jobs, he'd had neither the money nor the impetus to tackle home improvements of any kind. But with Malia now by his side for the rest of his life, and a decent-paying job with a pension to go with it, he would've torn the whole two-story house and two-car garage completely down and rebuilt the thing from scratch with his own two hands if she'd asked.

Yeah. He was _that_ gone on his wife.

He couldn't help but chuckle over the teasing he endured from Danny, and the looks Kono frequently gave him the morning after a particularly happy night in bed with his beautiful, perfect love. (Chin noted to himself that he apparently couldn't hide when he'd been thoroughly loved-on by his woman from his teammates. Sometimes it sucked having people know you so well.) The only one who didn't give him too much shit was Steve, but that was because Chin knew Steve wanted the same exact thing for himself and Catherine.

"It'll happen if it's meant to, _brah_," Chin had said to him once when they'd found themselves alone in the bullpen. "If Malia and I can happen, so can you and Catherine."

And Chin truly believed it. He thought maybe, just maybe, Steve had finally started to believe it, too.

One more swipe with the paint roller and Chin called the job well-done. He liked the…what had Malia called it?...'spring break green' color well enough, and right now she was out shopping for curtains, a rug and bedding to match it. He suspected she'd probably come back with some art for the walls, too, and grinned over how much fun she was probably having right now as he tossed the dirty paint roller into the trash bin he'd dragged into the hall from outside.

The alarm on his cell phone chose that moment to go off, so he made his way out to the dining room, where his phone was sitting on the table. He looked at the phone's screen, then silenced the alarm. Two o'clock on the dot, and so he got onto his phone's desktop and checked his incoming text messages. Other than two from Malia asking whether he wanted Venetian blinds to go with the curtains and then saying never mind, she'd found the perfect solution, there was nothing new there.

And that was a matter of concern for Chin Ho Kelly.

Last night, Steve had phoned him to let him know that he and Danny would be hiking to Kaliuwa'a Falls, and that in order to appease Danny's 'rational concern' over what tended to happen when he went on a hike with Steve ("It was only one time, Chin, you'd think this had happened a _dozen_ times the way he talks!"), would Chin please make sure Steve checked in with him by two o'clock, and if Steve didn't, and Chin couldn't get hold of the partners, could he please do his best to make sure nobody had fallen over a cliff again?

Of course, Chin had agreed. And had silently mused that after three years, Danny was actually having an impact on Steve by making him think ahead about the fact that things _might _go wrong no matter how prepared you were. By making sure Steve told others where he was going to be 'just in case.' Hey, it wasn't full-out calling for backup in every situation, and it could've just been because he was going to have Danny with him, but it was a step in the right direction for his friend and boss, so Chin counted it as a win. And wanted to give Danny a slap on the back for being such a good influence…even if it was in sort of a bass-ackwards Danny-World way.

Chin shook his head, a wry grin on his face, and sent a text message through to Steve's phone asking if he'd forgotten he was supposed to check in.

Thirty seconds went by.

Then sixty.

Ninety.

A little line appeared between Chin's eyebrows, his grin melting away. He sent a second text. 'Steve, you all right?'

Another thirty seconds.

Another sixty.

Another ninety.

"Damn," Chin swore softly. This time he sent a text to Danny. 'Having fun in the jungle?' he asked, figuring if nothing else, Danny would just take it as a concerned member of his _ohana_ checking up on the duo.

But after another ninety seconds, there was no reply from him, either.

Chin had Steve's satellite phone listed under Steve's contact info in his phone book, so he scrolled through until he found it, and dialed.

One ring.

Two.

Three.

Halfway through the fourth ring it was picked up. "_The child was meant to die! Those who prevented this must now be sacrificed!"_ was how the phone was answered.

The hair on the back of Chin's neck stood on end. He froze, eyes widening. He knew that voice belonged to neither Danny _or_ Steve. "Who is this?" he asked, stalking through to the kitchen, grabbing his goggles, badge and weapon from a side table, and practically running out the side door. He was careful to set the alarm and lock the door behind him. "Who _is_ this?" Chin barked again as he stood next to his motorcycle in the garage.

But the call was ended, and that was that. Quickly he put his goggles on, clipped his gun and badge to the waistband of his paint-stained jeans and hiked a leg up and over his bike. He dialed his cousin's number, but she didn't pick up.

"Kono, get to HQ. Something's happened to Steve and Danny."

And Christ, if _that_ didn't figure, and what the hell could've happened to them out in the middle of a park that was closed to public admittance to begin with, and what the heck had the guy who'd answered the sat phone meant by a child and a sacrifice?

As Chin pocketed his phone, started his bike and revved it up and waited for the automatic garage door opener to do its job, he got a really bad feeling low in his gut. A feeling that it wasn't just a matter of Steve maybe having lost the phone or the backpack he knew Steve would've carried it in. A feeling that said whatever had happened was much, much worse than that.

* * *

Kono's _sides_ hurt, she was laughing so hard. She and Ben and a few of Kono's lifelong friends and their husbands or boyfriends had been out on the North Shore all morning surfing their asses off. Only they'd been giving each other such shit in between wave-catching that Kono wasn't sure if her aching ribs stemmed from the laughter or the wipeouts.

Either way, it'd been one helluva Saturday already, and it wasn't over yet. Her stomach rumbled right before she heard Ben's do the same, and she shared a grin with him as, surfboards tucked under their right arms, they came up through the shallows of the ocean and onto the beach.

"Hey, _sistah_!" Kono's friend Malia (no, not Chin's Malia…it was a common name in Hawaii) called out from where all their towels were stacked about twenty feet back.

"Yeah!" Kono called back, breaking into a jog, driving the end of her board into the sand and looking at Malia quizzically.

Malia had a cell phone in her hand and stepped forward to hand it to Kono. "Your phone. You got a message from that hunky cousin of yours a couple minutes ago. That photo you use for him doesn't do him justice."

Kono grinned and rolled her eyes. "Thanks," she said as she thumbed the phone open to its desktop, then tapped on the voice mail button.

"_Kono, get to HQ. Something's happened to Steve and Danny."_

"Oh, shit," Kono breathed, ending the voice mail and reaching for her towel with one hand, surfboard with the other.

"What's going on, is it work?" Ben asked. Malia and her boyfriend Kwan looked curiously at her.

"In a manner of speaking," Kono replied. She leaned forward and gave Ben a kiss on the cheek. "Sorry, guys, but my bosses are in trouble."

"Again?" Ben asked as Kono raced toward the parking lot.

And, well, Kono guessed Ben was justified in asking that question, because it seemed like half their team was always in some sort of jeopardy at all times, even when there wasn't an active case involved. At least, Kono assumed this wasn't related to a case, active or otherwise, from Chin's tone of voice.

She got back to her truck, opened the rear window and slid her board inside. Then she reached down and grabbed a bag from the truck bed. Inside a minute she was fully dressed over top of her barely-there bikini, badge and gun included, and was dialing Chin on the phone as she slid into the driver's seat.

"Where are you, Cuz?"

"_Just got to HQ. Get here quick, Kono, I can't get either Steve or Danny on their cell phones and some stranger has Steve's sat phone."_

"The hell?" Kono said as her truck roared to life and she put it in Reverse. "How'd you find out?"

"_Steve took Danny to Kaliuwa'a Falls. He was supposed to have checked in with me by two, but when he missed the check-in, I tried both his and Danny's cells. Then I called the sat phone and someone other than them answered. Just get here."_

"I'm on the North Shore, it's going to take me a bit."

"All right. I'll see if I can't place them with cell GPS in the meantime."

"Get there as quick as I can," Kono said, hanging up the phone and laying it on her passenger seat. "Boys, what the hell have you gotten yourselves into now?" she asked of no one. Lips pursed together, she raced along Farrington Highway, silently berating herself for having brought her own personal vehicle instead of her red Five-0 car. Without lights and sirens, she had to count on the fact that no cops would come after her as she barreled down the highway.

Her brow knitted. "Please be okay, guys." Then her eyebrows skyrocketed. Steve's satellite phone. And who did Steve know who had a way with satellites? The fake tsunami case rattled through her mind, a story Chin told her where he'd sat right there while Steve asked his Lieutenant to use a secret satellite and managed to make a date with her at the same time.

Kono had stored in her phone, as did each member of Five-0, Catherine Rollins' emergency contact information. "Just in case," Danny had insisted as he'd collected and distributed all their emergency contact numbers after last year's clusterfuck with McGarrett and his supposed mother in Japan. Danny even gone so far as to program Steve's into his phone _for_ him, since he didn't trust Steve to actually do so himself...which had resulted in a spectacular wrestling match that had nearly destroyed the computer table, but hey.

She flicked her phone to life with her thumb, keeping one eye on the road as she sped along, and one on the contact list. There it was, Lt. Catherine Rollins. Quickly she opened the contact, and hit the only number listed there.

"Come on, Catherine," she whispered as the number rang for the first time. "If ever Steve needed your help, it's now."

* * *

Well, it wasn't a perfect solution, but they only had to go half a mile, so Steve figured it would do. He folded both Danny's good arm and splinted arm around the tiny baby – who was now out of his very wet carrier, wide awake and squalling like someone was pinching him as he lay belly-down on Danny's chest – then put his left arm under Danny's shoulders and his right under the backs of Danny's knees.

He mentally counted _One, Two, Three!_ And on three, he lifted Danny and the baby up, carefully balancing them so the infant didn't move an inch one way or the other from that spot. The next twenty minutes were a matter of stopping, looking at the ground in front of him, calculating the number of steps, sidesteps and foot-lifts he'd have to do, and then executing them in perfect form. Stop. Assess. Calculate. Execute. Over and over and over again like a mantra in his head that could barely be heard over the now-screaming infant.

Which meant their location, if anyone was looking to do them in, was no longer in question.

Steve angled Danny a little closer to his chest to ease the pressure on his own triceps. The baby slipped just a bit, its left arm using the new hard wall of Steve's chest as a timpani to beat against, little arms and legs flailing in consternation.

"Shh, little guy, it's okay," Steve said softly as he stopped. Looked. Calculated. Executed. "I hope you're a boy with that blue on, are you a boy? Hmm?"

Nothing he said, of course, stopped the cries, and slowly it was starting to grate on Steve's nerves. Especially since all the noise and jostling wasn't waking Danny. First, he'd been sure that easing the _pike_ spearhead out of Danny's side would jolt him awake, but it hadn't. Once it was out, Steve had tried to look into the wound to see if any of the sharks' teeth – he could see several were missing from the tip – were inside Danny's body. But he wasn't willing to stick his fingers into the hole in Danny's side, because he didn't know how clean his own hands were…and he'd gone into the freshwater pool prior to going after their perp.

Now, both being carried _and_ having a baby wailing right on top of him weren't waking Danny up, and that had Steve worried as hell. Stop. Assess. Calculate. And just as he was about to Execute again, he saw a ulu straight ahead to the left. A whole _grove_ of the trees, and he made a beeline for it.

He laid Danny gently down on the mostly overgrown trail that had once been used so much. Back in '99 there'd been a landslide at the base of Kaliuwa'a Falls that had killed something like twenty tourists, and because of the lawsuits that had followed from those peoples' families, the park had been permanently shut down, never to be touched by humans again.

Supposedly.

Obviously that wasn't actually the case. Obviously, Steve said to himself as he guilt-tripped the minutes away, he should've heeded the fact that the park was completely closed to all people instead of giving in to his desire to share another piece of his childhood with his partner. Obviously, thanks to the fact that that desire had won out over Danny's initial, "Isn't there a _reason_ this park is closed, Steven?" reaction, Steve now had a huge problem and no immediate way to fix it.

And Danny wasn't even awake to bitch at him, dammit. Nothing kept him going more than Danny giving him shit for getting them there in the first place. There was something, he mused, quite possibly a bit unhealthy about that, but whatever.

Steve picked the baby up from Danny's chest, only then feeling that the one-piece outfit he was wearing, while not soaking wet, was damp all over. He noted that in amongst the consistent three-second-interval screams, the child was shivering badly. Well, you didn't need to have been a father at some point to know what shivering meant.

Steve quickly unsnapped the outfit from the baby's neck all the way down the tiny chest, tummy, diaper and leg with his right hand, as he held the baby in the palm of his left hand, supporting his head with his four fingers and balancing his diaper-covered butt on the inside of his forearm.

He wasn't going to be able to continue this way, though, because of how much the baby was flailing as it screamed, so he sat down next to Danny's prone form, legs straight out in front of him, and laid the infant in his lap. Steve peeled the outfit off the baby, only to find the child's diaper was so wet it was actually making the hems of Steve's shorts wet. Well. He guessed that had to go, too, then.

Only he didn't have a diaper on him to replace it with. Steve rubbed his thumb and forefinger over and around his temple. "Dammit, Danny, this is _your _territory, not mine," he grumbled, looking all around them. Christ, all he had was his own shirt, shorts and underwear as cloth, because Danny's shirt and shorts (and probably underwear, though Steve wasn't keen to verify that personally) had blood on them. Okay…only one way to handle this, then.

He undid the barely hanging-on Velcro of the diaper left and right, rolled the soggy mess up and silently apologized to Hawaii's forests for shoving it off to the side, with no intention of taking it with him. Yep, okay, this was definitely a boy baby, then. Other than the little guy's skin being clammy to the touch and the near-constant shivering and wailing the baby was doing, he didn't seem harmed, and he wasn't at all dirty.

So Steve put the boy back down on his lap, hiked his own shirt off over his head and said, "Sorry about the sweat, little man, but hey, it's just us guys, right?" even though he knew the infant could neither hear him over his own cries, nor understand him even if he'd been quietly listening to Steve's every word.

The baby, now that Steve was giving him more than just a cursory glance, appeared to be Caucasian. He remembered his eyes were very dark blue from earlier when he'd been so quiet, but then also remembered his mom once telling Mary that all babies are born with that color eyes. He had a very thin shock of auburn hair on the top of his head, with only dark-colored peach fuzz surrounding the rest of his skull.

He was kinda cute, even when he was having a shitfit.

Okay, Steve was holding onto his own shirt and dammit, Danny should have been making "shirtless again?" comments but...okay, enough of that, Steve berated himself. That the situation could've been comical if Danny had been awake was neither here nor there because he _wasn't_.

So...how to make his shirt into something that would cover the kid enough to not soak Steve or Danny if he peed? This ought to be interesting. He decided since he'd seen many Hawaiian newborns being carted around by their parents wearing nothing more than a diaper, and that since it was probably somewhere around eighty degrees and very humid in the forest right now, he might be okay actually making two separate coverings for the kid out of his one shirt, and just using both pieces of the shirt as makeshift diapers rather than trying to cover the baby neck to toes.

He stopped, looked down at his partner's far-too-still form, and said, "See, Danny? I've got backup, even when it comes to babies."

Danny should've given him a look, rolled his eyes, taken the kid from his arms and explained precisely how he was doing this _so_ wrong even as he soothed the child into silence.

But Danny wasn't doing any of those things. Because Danny, thanks to Steve's brilliant hiking idea, was hurt.

Steve forced himself to stop thinking that way for about the umpteenth time ("Guilt-trip much?" he asked himself), pulled out his knife and went about cutting the tee shirt in half along its side seams. He folded one up and stuffed it into one of his shorts pockets, lifted the baby's hips and placed the other half-shirt under his butt.

Now it was just a matter of getting the thing to stay on the kid – who was still screaming, by the way – and then work fast to collect enough breadfruit tree sap to tend to Danny's wound. And just as Steve was getting the shirt tied up so that it wasn't too tight (he hoped) but would stay around the baby's mess-making parts, a sudden thought occurred to him, and he found his eyes riveted to Danny's slack face.

Danny had been in the water prior to getting hit with the _pike_ tip. He'd been sitting _in_ the water after catching the baby in its carrier. And who knew whether he had fallen, or if his wound had come into direct contact with the falls' pool as he got the baby and himself out of it?

"Oh, God," Steve whispered, lifting the baby to his shoulder and holding him there, his hand covering the entirety of the tiny back as his own eyes got big and round.

Because if Danny's wound had been exposed to _any_ of the freshwater after he was stabbed…he could already be infected with Leptospirosis.

And sap from the breadfruit tree, while a decent enough antiseptic for regular scratches and associated germs, wouldn't do jack _shit_ to stop that particular bacteria.

Steve needed to get this kid and his partner to a hospital, and he needed to do it _fast_.


	4. Chapter 4

_U.S.S. Enterprise  
South Atlantic Ocean_

Catherine watched the incoming flow of transmissions across her screen, but as with what she'd seen for the prior six hours of this particular duty shift, there wasn't anything to incite concern on the chatter rolling through the airwaves of this part of the globe.

She sighed, then looked down at her desk as her cell phone buzzed. A Hawaii area code, but not Steve. At least, not one of his numbers from her contact list. Huh. She picked up the phone and thumbed the call open. "Lieutenant Rollins."

"_Hi, this is Officer Kono Kalakaua of Five-0. I work for Steve."_

Catherine looked around her left, right and behind. There was no one near. She forced herself to remain calm. "Yes, I remember you, Kono. What's happened?"

"_Well, we don't know and I need a favor."_

"Steve's kind of favor?"

"_Yeah, exactly that kind."_

Catherine relaxed. Thank God, no other reason for Kono to call than looking for help on a case. "Okay, and why did the Boy Scout himself not call me, he isn't out with some other pretty Lieutenant, is he?" she asked, a smile on her face as she prepared to bring up whatever satellite's feed it was Steve had told Kono to ask for.

"_No, Catherine, it…it's _Steve_ who might be in trouble."_

And the knot of fear settled back into Cath's gut like lead. "What do you need?"

"_I need you to track Steve's sat phone signal. You have the number?"_

She frowned. "Um…no, I don't think I've got anything other than home, work and cell phone." She was trying so _hard_ to hold it together, because one of Steve's teammates calling her for help? Bad. Very bad.

But this was Steve. He'd been in plenty of hairy situations before and always came out of them, even if it was a little worse for the wear at the end of it. He always healed. He always was there smiling with arms wide open when she came into port. He'd be there next time. This was nothing.

"_Okay, hang on, I'm putting you on speaker so I can read it off my contact list…it's one, eight-oh-eight, nine-eight-two, four-two-four-three. Got it?"_

"Got it. I'm accessing the MSAT unit in closest geosynchronous orbit to Hawaii." Cath stopped speaking, very aware that her voice held a tremor that she wasn't disguising very well.

"_We'll find him, Catherine,"_ Kono said softly. _"With your help, we'll find him."_

Catherine nodded even though she knew Kono couldn't see her. The satellite's control screen came up on her monitor and she darted her eyes left and right again to check that she was still alone. Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she pulled up a confidential file containing all Earth-orbiting satellite codes. Numbers flowed across her screen until the program found a match and entered the administrative user ID and password into MSAT's system.

Barely a second later, she had full access to the positioning log and tapped in Steve's sat phone number. "Okay, it's doing a search. Has the phone been used within the last week, do you know?"

"_Yes. Chin called it just after two today because Steve and Danny hadn't checked in. He said some stranger answered the phone, which led him to calling me in to work. Oh, hang on, Catherine, Chin's calling right now. Let me patch him into a three-way."_

"Am altering search parameters to be for this date only in standard time," Catherine stated, doing exactly what she said as she said it, keeping focused on the task at hand.

"_Cuz, I have Catherine Rollins on the line. She's looking to see if she can pinpoint where Steve's sat phone was last positioned when you called it. You got anything?"_

"_Yeah, hi, Catherine."_

"Hi, Lieutenant Kelly," Catherine replied as the satellite's memory banks flipped numbers across her screen far too quickly for her to keep up.

"_Kono, I've got a GPS lock on both Steve's and Danny's phones. They're literally right on top of each other."_

"_Well, they probably put them in the backpack, you know how Danny complains about having to carry his in his pocket."_

"_Yeah, and that's fine, but the thing is that unless Google Maps is on the blink, those phones are nowhere _near _Kaliuwa'a Falls."_

"Steve took Danny to Kaliuwa'a Falls?" Catherine asked in disbelief even as a picture of Earth from the MSAT appeared on the monitor. "Hasn't that park been closed for something like a decade now?"

"_Longer,"_ she heard Chin reply. _"But Steve used to go hiking there with his mom and sister and some of his mom's friends. I guess it was just something he wanted to share."_

Catherine swallowed hard. Funny how she and Steve had never gone to the falls together. Then she smiled. Heck, they rarely got out of _bed _when she was there, and what the hell else was the man supposed to do while she sailed the seven seas, sit at home pining away?

"Okay, I'm getting a position on where that phone was at precisely two-oh-six Hawaii time, guys. I'm zeroing in."

"_Chin, you said their phones aren't anywhere near the falls. Where are they, could the guys maybe have gone somewhere else once Danny saw the Park Closed signs?"_

"_No. They're still in the park, all right. But they're way down the river from the falls, a good two miles, I'd say."_

"_You think the phones, the backpack, floated downstream or something?"_

"_I don't _know_," _Chin ground out, and Catherine could hear the worry in his voice.

"I've got a lock on it," Cath said, eyes scanning the imagery as she told it to zoom in. "It looks like it was about half a mile north of a stream of some sort, still in that park."

"_That's the Kaluanui Stream, it has to be,"_ Kono said. _"How far east of the falls?"_

"Hold on a minute," Cath said, frowning at what she was seeing through the sat feed. "That can't be. You're sure the park is still closed."

"_It is,"_ Chin said. _"As far as I know, the Hawaiian government has no intention of reopening it. The last time a conservation team ventured over with a helicopter was a couple years ago. They're treating it like a sleeping dog."_

"Well, then your state has a bunch of squatters who've taken full advantage of the fact that their government is most likely not even going to know they're there."

"_Squatters?"_ Kono questioned. _"What are you talking about?"_

"Guys, that sat phone call was made from dead center in what looks like a camp. I mean a real camp, full of tents, some large and some small. There's movement; I'm counting at _least_ three dozen men, women and children."

"_What?"_ Chin breathed across the line. _"There are people _camping_ there?"_

"I'm looking at it with my own eyes, and I'm on live footage."

"_Can you patch it through to us?"_

Catherine shook her head. "I can't redirect a live feed, it'll raise too many red flags. But I can shoot you some screenshots. Do you think maybe Danny and Steve ran into these people?"

"_I don't know. If they had, I think Danny would've wanted to arrest them for being there and Steve would have wanted to find out _why_ they were there."_

"_You're probably right, Kono, and then they would've joined them because Danny always follows Steve no matter how off-the-wall he gets."_

Catherine couldn't help but smile. That those two men were each other's best friends was something she knew already. Hearing the affection from Chin and Kono, though, for _both_ men, made her heart ache for Steve. It'd been so long since the last time they'd been together thanks to this six-month-long assignment she was currently only four months into.

"_Can't thank you enough, Catherine," _Kono said. _"Cuz, you got a twenty on Steve's truck?"_

"_Yep, patching through to your phone now."_

"_I'll scoot over the H3 then up Kamehameha Highway to check it out."_

"_All right. In the meantime, I'll see if I can't find out who these people are. Thanks, Catherine, we'll keep you updated."_

Catherine broke her connection to the satellite feed. She hadn't seen anyone that looked like either Steve or Danny, but then again ,the pictures weren't crystal clear on something as tiny as human faces, not from the MSAT. Not military, that was why, she thought scornfully.

"I appreciate you keeping me in the loop," she said as she exited back to her regular communications monitoring software. "I'm just…thank you."

"_No problem,"_ Kono replied and yeah, Cath could hear in her voice that she understood. _"Hanging up now, guys."_

Cath worried at her lip, teeth digging in so hard it forced her _not_ to let her mind go there. Danny was fine. Steve was fine. They were _fine_. There was a logical explanation for this, and they'd turn up before night hit Hawaii.

They _would_.

* * *

Steve wasn't going to get the baby to quiet down any time soon, so all he could do was use some foliage to fashion a nest of sorts in the shade for the little guy and get to work on Danny. The wound had clotted up well, but that meant that whatever was inside Danny's body cavity was sealed in behind the newly-formed scab, whether bacteria or sharks' teeth.

He couldn't do anything about it right now. Not without any supplies. He picked two breadfruit from the nearest tree and sliced them each in half. The sap inside each fruit was sticky and milky white. He used the blunt side of the knife blade to scoop it out, then pulled a foot-long green leaf from a nearby plant and smeared the substance over the center of it. He scooped out the rest of the sap from that half of one breadfruit, did the same, putting it on the leaf.

He mirrored the actions through the second half-breadfruit, then the third and finally, the fourth. Eyeing what he had on the leaf, he calculated it would be enough to last a while, so he laid the leaf on top of Danny's legs, wiped his knife off on another nearby plant, folded it and stuffed it into one of his pockets.

And it was in the stuffing-in of his knife that his fingers lit on something he'd completely forgotten he had in there. He pulled it out. It was a protein bar. Well, a protein bar wouldn't make the kid happy, but once he got Danny's wound bandaged with the flat, smooth leaf covered in breadfruit sap, he was going to get his partner to wake up no matter what, and he'd need the bar to help regain his strength. Steve left it in his pocket.

Even if Leptospirosis had gotten into Danny's body, it'd be anywhere from two to twenty-five days before symptoms presented, which meant that Danny must have passed out due to blood loss and pain, not due to bacteria - at least, not yet. What that didn't explain was why he hadn't yet woke up unless he'd hit his head real hard passing out. But his pupils weren't dilated, which meant he _should_ be waking up. It'd been an hour now, Steve thought, looking at his watch, and then his eyes widened when he saw what time it was.

Three o'clock.

He was supposed to have checked in with Chin an _hour_ ago. An _hour_! That meant Chin _had_ to know something was wrong! He would've tried to phone Steve and Danny's cell phones, then he would've tried Steve's satellite phone. He would've received no answer, and gone to headquarters to GPS the truck and both phones. He would've called Kono, and Steve just _knew_ the two cousins would be on their way already, probably even as he sat here trying to tend to a _very_ noisy baby and an unconscious partner.

He looked at his partner. "Chalk one up for you, Danny," he said. "If I hadn't let Chin know where we were going to be..." Steve shook his head. Now all he needed was for Danny to wake up and give him crap about having been right all along about calling for backup.

Steve moved fast to get Danny's tee shirt off him, whipped his knife back out and sliced away the blood-stained portion. He cut the rest of it into strips of cloth and hurried to cover Danny's wound with the leaf, ensuring the sap was centered. The strips of tee shirt he knotted together two at a time, using them to wrap around Danny's abdomen, tying them off tightly first one set, then a second and then a third, holding the leaf in place.

And that was about all there was to be done for the wound.

Now to wake Danny up and quiet the kid down! _Coconut milk!_ Steve wondered if he could get the kid to drink it. Well, it was something to try, anyway. What the hell did he know about what infants would take besides their mother's milk?

As he was about to scoot closer to Danny's face, for the way too many-eth time in his life, Steve heard a gun cock behind his head. Slowly he raised his hands and made to turn his head to see who it was.

"Don't," a man's voice growled. Steve froze, then a Caucasian woman came into his line of sight, stooped down and picked up the baby.

"Hey, leave him alone!" Steve barked.

The woman acted like she hadn't even heard him, quickly moving away. Within seconds the baby was quiet and Steve trembled with rage. If they'd done something to that little boy, he would kill every one of them with his bare hands.

"Police issue gun," the man behind him said. "Nice."

So. This was who had taken Steve's backpack.

"Also, nice phone. Too bad you won't live long enough for the friend who called it to find you."

Steve's eyes closed. Chin. It _had _to have been Chin. He took several deep breaths to keep himself calm, then spoke. "What do you want?"

"You'll see. Bring them both."

A crack to the back of his head, and Steve knew only darkness.

* * *

"Yeah, Chin, it's me," Kono said into her phone as she circled Steve's truck. She checked both doors; both were locked. "I've got eyes on Steve's truck. Engine's cold, no signs of disturbance."

"_Anything in the bed of it?"_

"No," Kono replied, climbing up onto the back bumper to find there wasn't anything in the bed except the silver box along the back of the cab. "Not a damn thing."

"_Anyone else in the vicinity?"_

"Nope. I am literally out here all alone. The road was blocked off. I could see where Steve had cut the bolt on the gates, but he had reclosed them and tied the chain off after coming through."

"_Okay, so we know they got to the area, at least."_

"You getting anything from those screenshots Catherine sent?" Kono walked back around the truck again, scanning the dirt beneath the vehicle, all around it. She stopped at the grill, inspecting it, finding nothing.

"_No. Stay with Steve's truck. I've got Army evac headed your way."_

"Not going anywhere. Even if I set out on the old trails, I'd never find the falls without help."

"_No kidding. That is some seriously deep forest out there. Listen, I might have a line on something here, hang on."_

Kono waited, could hear Chin's tiny grunts of frustration and then the exhalation that told her he had indeed found something. "What'cha got?"

"_Well, I remember once when I was kid, Auntie Lou telling me the story of Cousin Loh, who'd run off and joined some cult in Pennsylvania that camped out in the mountains."_

"Cult? Are you kidding me? Cousin Loh is _lolo_, come on. Nobody's heard from him in three years."

"_Yeah, I know, but I put something together that the guy who answered the sat phone told me with the one and only conversation I ever had with Loh, and combined that with the location Steve and Danny were hiking to - because it's also called Sacred Falls, for the non-Hawaiians among us. Believe it or not, I came up with a hit in an FBI profiler's novel published four years back."_

"Wait, what'd the guy who answered Steve's sat phone say?"

"_He said the child was supposed to be sacrificed."_

"Child? What the hell, what child?"

"_These photos Catherine sent _do_ show some very small people who could only be children."_

"So you're thinking this is a cult?"

"_Well, listen to this. Roy Hazelton, famous serial killer profiler, consulted on a case the FBI handled out of California nine years ago. He wrote about it in one of his books. Apparently a common thing with the cults that aren't centered around Christian values and beliefs, is a tendency toward native beliefs in whatever area they've chosen to live."_

"Okay," Kono said, frowning as she tried to understand. "But what the hell do Loh, the falls here on Oahu, native beliefs and a child, have to do with whatever's happened to Steve and Danny?"

"_Maybe nothing, but maybe a lot," _Chin replied. _"Hazelton states that in many cases, those cults who aren't beholden to Christian mythology find themselves searching for alternate religions."_

"You mean like Egyptians, like gods and goddesses?" Kono asked.

"_Exactly like that. Native Americans and Hawaiians, too."_

"So if they had camped out here, they'd be looking at Hawaiian traditions. Spirits, ancestors, that sort of thing."

"_The man's exact words to me were, 'The child was meant to die. Those who prevented this must now be sacrificed.' Were you paying attention in Hawaiian history class in school?"_

Kono frowned, then the light bulb went on. "Human sacrifice?"

"_Bingo."_

"Ohmagod," Kono breathed, running a hand through her hair as the sounds of distant sirens reached her ears. "You think they ran into some cult members, the people that Catherine caught on the satellite feed, who were about to sacrifice a child?"

"_And I think Steve and Danny stopped it from happening."_

"Which means _they_ could be in those peoples' hands as we speak."

"_And if they are, it means they're going to be even more hostile than they might've been before. Not only because the sacrifice was stopped, but because of another thing the profiler says in his book about these people: 'Anyone from the outside world represents a grave threat to the cult leader, especially if these are people in positions of authority, including but not limited to, church priests and pastors, park rangers, police officers and other law enforcement officials.'"_

"They would've had their guns and their badges on them. They may _not_ have worn them, though."

"_Yeah, but they would always have them on their person at all times, so if not wearing, then in Steve's backpack."_

"Shit. So, no secret that they're cops. How long on the Army chopper?"

"_Just got a text. They've lifted off and are on their way."_

"Well, I'm hearing some sirens."

"_That'll be local cops from Hauula."_

"They must be coming up Kawaipuna Street. I left the gate open."

"_All right, I'll radio them and let them know. Stay put; I want you in the air with that chopper."_

"What are you going to do?"

"_I'm calling in reinforcements. If Steve and Danny _are_ being held by a cult or similar group of people, from the number I'm seeing on the sat images, it's going to take a lot more than four local cops, the two of us and one Army chopper to take them out."_

"I'll let you know once we're in the air. Keep your ear bud in."

"_Will do. And be careful."_

"No worries, Cuz. I'll be with the Army. I'll be perfectly safe."

"_Yeah. And Steve and Danny were only going on a fun little hike."_

"Truth," Kono said, and thumbed the call closed. She shook her head, looking all around in the sky as the sirens came closer…closer. No sound of a chopper yet, but she wasn't going anywhere until it arrived and had her in the air.

She knew, thanks to Catherine, exactly where to direct them.

And if it came down to it, Kono was fully prepared to do exactly what their team had done in North Korea if necessary: risk her own life to get Steve and, this time, _Danny_, out alive.

Of course, Chin would probably kill her if the people who had her bosses didn't first…


	5. Chapter 5

Yeah, okay, Danny _hurt_. Like, _really_ hurt. His side ached, his arm felt like it was busted and…where the hell was his shirt? He groaned, turned his head to the side and forced his eyelids to open. Then he blinked. And blinked again. Because he was lying atop a large, soft mattress on the ground, inside what appeared to be a huge tent. Only thing was, he wasn't alone.

There in the bed next to him, stretched out on his back apparently asleep, was his equally shirtless partner. And in between them was a tiny little baby sound asleep on his back, a blue onesie covering him neck to toes.

All right, so one of two things was going on here: Either Danny and Steve got married and had a kid (maybe not in that order and hey, he's read the Five-0 rumor mill websites too, you know) and were spending their honeymoon camping (that would be Steve's idea of a romantic getaway, of course it would), and Danny slept through the whole damn thing (which was probably for the best, all things considered)…or someone had gotten the three of them out of the jungle to safety. He was pretty sure the latter was the most likely scenario.

"Hey," Danny said, tongue feeling like it weighed three hundred pounds inside his mouth. When Steve didn't respond, didn't even move a muscle, Danny looked down at himself and frowned at what he saw.

His right forearm, resting on his stomach, was splinted with what looked like small tree trunks and a bunch of vines. That looked like something Steve might've done. Ohhh, Danny remembered now…his arm had hurt like hell and he hadn't been able to move it. So…he must've broken it when he caught the baby carrier, and the bone had crushed some nerves, rendering his entire arm immobile. Okay, that he could work with.

But what about the god-awful ache in his side that, for a change, wasn't named Steve?

He tried to sit up, but the stab of pain that resulted made him wheeze out a breath and decide horizontal was his best bet for the moment. Okay, think. Last thing he remembered…hurting like hell and getting the baby in his carrier off to the side of the pool. Steve being gone, running after the guy who'd dropped the kid over the falls to begin with.

Well. Steve was obviously back, he thought, as he turned his head to the side and looked at his partner again. "Steve," he whispered, thinking, _whatever's going on, I don't want to wake the baby. _"Steven, since when do you sleep through the sound of my voice?" he asked a little louder, figuring if anyone could goad Steve into waking up, it'd be him.

There! He was sure he'd seen one of Steve's eyelids move just a little. "Steve, you stupid adrenaline junky, wake _up_! You just _had_ to take me hiking!" he whispered fiercely. Yes. A rant would wake the man up all the way. "First a dead body next to a bunch of pictures it took ancient Hawaiians _eons_ to carve into rock, and you breaking your arm and now, what, you wanted us to having a matching set? Is this your idea of picking out china patterns or something?"

Steve groaned.

Danny grinned. Worked every time. "Wake up, princess."

"Fuck," was the extremely eloquent reply he received.

"Watch your language, there's a child present."

"Gracie's here?" Steve asked thickly, eyes still closed.

Danny scowled. Talk about out of it. "Grace? What? No, the baby!"

Steve's eyes popped open. "When did we have a baby?"

"You know, if I wasn't in so much pain, and if that kid wasn't sleeping between us, I'd hit you right now."

"Wha' for?"

"For taking me out on yet another clusterfuck of an adventure, McGarrett style. Now, what the hell's going on? Where are we?"

Like lightning, Steve was wide awake, twisted in the bed and clamped his hand over Danny's mouth, looking wildly around like guerillas might be waiting in the nonexistent shadows of the big tent they were in. Danny tried to bite Steve's hand to get him _off_, but Steve shook his head and whispered, "Shhh." And that look in his partner's eyes was one Danny was all too familiar with, so he shushed.

And thought, instead_. So. Us lying on a big mattress on the floor inside a tent with a baby between us isn't all it was cracked up to be._ Of course not, Danny's life could _never_ be that easy. Not that McGarrett combined with a baby would ever _be_ easy, but anyway…

"Stay quiet," Steve whispered. Danny nodded, and Steve removed his hand, rolling gracefully to his feet, and rising to full height next to the mattress. But Danny caught the wince Steve let out, watched as he raised a hand to the base of his skull and scowled. All right, at least Danny wasn't the only one injured.

Steve moved toward the front flap of the tent and parted it just enough to peek through. "Shit," he breathed. He stayed there for a few more seconds while Danny gingerly rolled his body a little toward the baby, being careful to hold his splinted arm back so it stayed along his _really_ sore side rather than thunk down onto the baby.

Steve turned around and eyed Danny and the sleeping angel (they were always angelic when asleep). "We've gotta get out of here."

"Where _are_ we?" Danny asked quietly.

"I don't know, but there are a shitload of tents like this one; it's an encampment of some sort. Danny, you got hit in the side with a _pike_ spearhead," Steve explained as he returned to kneel on the mattress next to the baby.

"A _what_?"

"Ancient Hawaiian weapon, only this one was new, more recently made. Do you remember it hitting you?"

Danny shook his head. "No, I just remember that my side was killing me and I couldn't move my arm here," he replied, indicated said arm by raising his elbow a little. "Then I guess I passed out once I got the baby to the shore and don't you _dare _give a man in pain shit for passing out or I'll brain you."

"When I found you, the baby's clothes were damp, his carrier was soaked. Danno, I pulled the damn spearhead out of your side _and_ splinted your arm, plus the kid screamed for over half an hour and you wouldn't wake up!"

Danny blinked. Looked down at the baby. "He doesn't look damp now."

"No, I took his thing off and his other thing and made a diaper out of my shirt."

Unable to help the small smile he got on his face at that, Danny opened his mouth to comment on Steve's less-than-descriptive vocabulary, but Steve held up a finger, eyes getting that laser focused look, head whipping around – which made him wince again – toward the front flap of the tent. Danny clamped his mouth shut. He heard someone walk by, then muffled words, then whoever it was seemed to leave.

"You think you can move through the forest with me?" Steve asked, turning back to face him.

"I'm pretty partial to _not_ moving right now, if you don't mind," Danny said as his side reminded him it hurt.

"I got your wound covered with breadfruit sap," and Danny mouthed the words _breadfruit sap_ in disbelief because, really?, "and was about to try and wake you up when we were captured."

"That's not good."

"No. They have our badges, our weapons, all our phones. They'd taken my backpack from where I dropped it next to the pool at the base of the falls. By the time I got back to you, it was nowhere to be found. They pulled my gun off me after they knocked me on the back of the head, I guess."

"Okay, so you made a homemade diaper, a homemade splint," Danny huffed, talking just to keep himself from focusing on the pain as he elbowed himself delicately into a sitting position, "yanked a spearhead out of my side, made a Nature Bandage," _oh mother of GOD this fucking hurts_, "and wait, I didn't see any breadfruit trees near the falls." After all that, Danny could barely get his breathing under control and panted in an effort to do so.

"I carried you two half a mile back along the trail to one," Steve whispered, eyes moving around the tent.

"You carried me."

"Both of you," Steve corrected, then his eyes lit up and he moved the eight or so feet from the mattress to the front corner of the tent. "This should do."

"I am so glad I wasn't awake. I never would've let you carry me, and if you tell Chin and Kono, I will kill you."

"Let me get us out of here first, then you can kill me," Steve replied, returning to the mattress with what appeared to be a hand-hewn walking stick. He slapped the end of it into the palm of his hand a couple times. "This should help."

"Help what? You going to beat me over the head with it?" Danny asked, using his good arm to try and push himself off the mattress. He gasped as a spike of pain jabbed through his abdomen, and lost his balance, falling right toward the sleeping baby. _Oh, shit!_

And just like that, strong hands grabbed hold of his biceps and he was being hauled away from the baby and that mattress to an upright position. He swayed, tears leaking out the corners of his eyes at the unbelievable _pain_, eyelids squeezed shut, sweat gathering on his upper lip. He heard himself moan as the ache in his side slowly went from searing pain to drum corps pounding.

"You okay?" Steve asked, and he was so close Danny could feel his breath on his forehead.

"No," Danny panted.

"I need you to walk, Danno, and to carry that baby," Steve said, keeping his hands tight on Danny's arms. "I can't defend us and carry one or both of you at the same time. And we've got to be able to move quickly."

"How…are we…getting out of the tent…" Danny managed to ask, "…without them…seeing us?"

"It looks like they're pulling up stakes. There's a lot of activity and I saw a couple of tents down already. I think we can make it, but you've _got_ to keep that baby quiet, Danny, or they'll know immediately that we're on the move."

Finally Danny opened his eyes, only to find Steve _right there_, eyes full of concern and, Danny was pretty sure, some serious guilt. "I'm sorry," Steve whispered. "It seems like every time I want to share a memory with you, I get us into trouble."

Danny half-smiled, raising his good hand and patting Steve's hip because shit, none of this was Steve's fault, not really, and if they hadn't been there the little baby on the bed would probably be dead right now. "Maybe from now on we stick to making new memories instead of reliving old ones, huh?"

Steve gave him a half-smile in return. "You're on, partner. Now, how best to pick up the baby?" He let Danny go slowly, waited to see if Danny would be staying upright on his own.

Danny nodded at him, waved him off. Steve backed away. "Both hands under the entirety of his body, gentle lift up, angle him so his head will fall on my shoulder here," Danny used his chin to point at the shoulder of the good arm, "and wait 'til I've got my arm under his backside and my hand over his back to let go."

"Got it," Steve said with all the focus usually dedicated to disarming bombs as he zeroed in on the sleeping boy.

"He won't explode, McGarrett," Danny said.

"I know that, but you didn't hear him. It's more like a continual eruption," Steve quipped, and Danny snorted in reply.

Danny watched as Steve carefully slid his hands under the infant, splaying his fingers so that he had everything from the entirety of the little head all the way down to the backs of the baby's knees covered, and slowly lifted him into the air.

Wow. Steve holding a baby. Now there was something Danny had never seen before. Sure, he'd seen him carry kids six, seven, ten years of age. Once he'd even seen Steve cradling a teenage girl against him as he carried her out of the house where she'd been held after being kidnapped.

But never a newborn baby. It was…well, it was…um…_odd_?

"What's with that face?" Steve asked, scowling as Danny moved slowly around the mattress to meet him halfway.

"What face?" Danny asked, reforming his features into annoyance from whatever it was that had caught Steve's attention. "I don't have a face. _You_ have faces. I have the _same_ face, all the time. See? Happy Danno, Sad Danno, all the same."

"Tsk," Steve replied, coming around to Danny's good side. "Okay," he whispered, "can you lean into him a little?"

Danny nodded, trying like hell to ignore the continual stab in his right side as he bent forward a bit at an angle to where Steve was holding the still-sleeping baby out toward him front-first. "Okay," Danny said.

Slowly the baby came nearer and nearer, and Danny reached out to tuck his forearm under the diaper butt, covering Steve's hand as Steve maneuvered the baby's head onto Danny's shoulder. Danny twisted his arm a little so his hand was flat against the baby's back, then nodded at Steve, who slowly pulled his hands away with only a little bump as his fingers slid out from under Danny's hand and arm.

"There," Steve said, looking for all the world like he'd just disarmed a nuclear device. He picked up the walking stick from where he'd dropped it on the grass next to the mattress, then looked up and said, "Stick close, Danny, and whatever you do, keep that kid asleep."

"Yes, sir," Danny replied, but it was only half in jest, because now it was life or death, not fun and games and watching Steve handle a baby. And goddamn sonofa_bitch_ when he started to walk across the tent to follow Steve, his side let him know that this was going to be no walk in the park even if they _were_ still in a park which, really, Danny didn't actually know.

Steve reached the tent entrance, held up a fisted hand, and Danny stopped. Ten seconds of Steve peering through the flap, and then a nod as he pulled it back and gestured for Danny to go through.

_Here we go_, Danny thought, holding the baby to his shoulder just that much tighter. And while Danny wasn't much of a praying man, he sent a quick one out to whoever was listening and any SEAL angels that might be hanging around Steve. Because Danny had a feeling they were going to need all the help they could get.

* * *

"Chin, you receiving me?" Kono asked into the mic of her headset, through which the chopper pilot, Griesbach, had routed a call to Chin's cell phone.

"_Yeah, loud and clear. You in the air?"_

"Yeah, we're headed toward where that camp was on the satellite photos," Kono replied, peering out of the chopper's front and side windows. "Where are you?"

"_Nearly there. The local cops arrive?"_

"Yes, they're calling in Parks Search and Rescue, along with the Unified Armed Forces' Search and Rescue, thanks to Captian Griesbach here." The pilot nodded once at her. "They've got two ambulances for injured _en route_, and a prison bus from Halawa's on the way in case these people turn out to be hostile."

"_Good. You see anything suspicious yet?"_

Kono frowned, shaking her head as she kept looking everywhere she could possibly see. "No. If Catherine's coordinates were accurate, I think we've found the mostly cover-free area where the tents were, but there isn't a group of tents there at _all_ right now…wait, wait." Kono turned to the pilot and circled her hand in the air between them. "Can you swing back around?"

Griesbach nodded and began to do just that.

"_You spot something?"_

"I don't know, it wasn't a standing tent, but it looked like canvas, maybe."

"_They folding up shop? Maybe they know we're looking for them?"_

"Could be," Kono said as she plastered her face to the window on her right. "There," she said, pointing down toward the ground. "Got enough clearance to land down there?" she asked the pilot, who checked his instruments.

"Should be wide enough for our blade-span," Griesbach replied. "All right, men, ready your weapons, there could be hostiles. You've all seen the photos of Lieutenant Commander McGarrett and Detective Williams that Officer Kalakaua showed you, and there's every possibility one or both could be injured, or could be with a child. Eyes open, girls."

"Yes, _sir_!" the eight man in the back of the chopper answered through the headphones.

Kono inhaled deeply, then slowly exhaled. Soon they'd find Steve and Danny. Soon they'd find out who all these people were from the sat photos. Soon they'd be headed back to Honolulu safe and sound, and then they could sit around the table back at HQ and shoot the shit, make fun of Steve, Danny and their hiking trips, and generally just feel relieved that once again, everyone came through a hairy situation with flying colors.

That was the story she chose to tell herself, and by God, she was sticking to it.

"We're going in, Cuz," she said into the microphone.

"_Malama pono,"_ was Chin's reply.

"I will, Chin," she said, then signaled the pilot to cut the call. Once he did, she whispered, "You take care, too."


	6. Chapter 6

Steve wasn't quite sure what to do here, because from the moment Danny had scurried through the tent flap, and Steve had followed, practically pushing him across the twenty feet that stood between them and the jungle cover, tears had been streaming out of Danny's eyes like he was watching _Enemy Mine_ rather than running for his life with Steve and a baby.

And Steve knew his partner well enough to know that meant Danny was in _serious_ pain.

Not ten feet into the cover of trees and other thick foliage, there was a shout from behind them. "Shit!" Steve breathed. "They know we're gone, Danny, we gotta _move_!"

But instead of going faster, Danny stopped cold, Steve very nearly running into his back. "_Can't_," Danny panted, sagging back against the plaited, wall-like root-and-trunk of a Mangrove behind him. "_Hurts_."

Steve looked Danny up and down, heard lots of commotion back in the clearing, and his mind raced with what to do.

"Take Junior," Danny said, wiggling his fingers against the baby's back. "Get him…outta here…Steve…"

"Not leaving you, Danno," Steve growled, as if Danny could think that would _ever_ be an option. What the hell kind of SEAL did he think Steve was, anyway, after all this time?

The words of the people who'd been holding them captive wafted to them clear as day. They were organizing a search party. They were coming after them.

"_Steve_," Danny ground out, making like he was going to double forward. Steve's hands reached out and quickly snatched the baby away, flipping him and laying him against his own shoulder. Miraculously, the kid barely moved in response. "No time," Danny panted, left hand coming down to grasp his thigh, face twisted in agony.

"Fuck, Danny, you can hit me later, but I do _not_ leave _any_ of my men behind," Steve whispered fiercely. He transferred the walking stick to his left hand, the stick and his hand and forearm now along the baby's back.

"Wha-?" Danny said, peering up at him, but Steve could see he was operating through a fog.

"Come on," Steve grunted as he bent forward, got his right shoulder under Danny's chest, and lifted him into the air.

He expected to get hit. Or at least, verbally abused for the maneuver.

That Danny was silent, and hanging limply there with only Steve's arm wrapped as far around the man's waist as he could get it holding him in place, chilled Steve to the bone.

But the voices were getting closer, so with Danny over one shoulder and Junior resting on the other, Steve did the only thing he could: he ran like hell.

* * *

"Lieutenant Chin Ho Kelly, Five-0," Chin stated as he approached the newly-arrived Unified Armed Services Search and Rescue Team Leader, hand outstretched.

"Commander David R. Allen, United States Navy," the uniformed man in his fifties with salt-and-pepper hair replied, shaking his hand. "I hear you've got men lost in that forest," he continued, jerking his thumb toward the old entryway to the park.

"That we do. Head of Five-0, Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett, and his partner, Detective Danny Williams."

"McGarrett? The former SEAL?"

"One and the same," Chin nodded, turning and looking at where two uniformed men, dressed in camo greens like the Commander, were spreading a large map over the dirt parking area.

"The man's practically a legend in some circles. His training should make _our_ jobs easier."

"Yes, but there's also the possibility they're traveling with a child, and we don't know whether any of them are injured," Chin replied as they crouched down to get a look at the map.

"You know this jungle?"

"Not well, no. Steve knows at least some of it, though; he hiked these parts as a kid."

The Commander nodded and looked down at the map. "What do you think, Snapper?"

A guy who looked like a younger version of Brad Pitt squinted up at them through the sun in his eyes. "I think our best bet is to split up. Half the personnel here, including the local Parks team, should head toward that clearing where these sat photos Lieutenant Kelly provided show the encampment placement."

"And the other half head toward the falls?" Chin asked.

Snapper nodded. "Yes, sir. I believe we have enough of a complement here to effect a successful rescue and defend against any hostiles we may encounter. The question mark is determining where Commander McGarrett believes his best chance for survival is. If he was near the clearing and has escaped, would he head downstream or back toward the falls? Or. to throw another wrench into it, north away from the stream?"

Commander Allen looked at Chin, both men rising to their full height. "I know Steve," Chin said, "but the wild card here is whether either of them are hurt. If we're looking at Danny leading the charge, the thought process will be very different. He isn't likely to have a good grasp of his bearings out here like Steve is."

"I'm in charge of the Search and Rescue, Lieutenant, but these are _your_ teammates. _You_ know them. So it's your call."

Chin briefly closed his eyes. "Officer Kalakaua and a team of nine soldiers are hitting the ground at the clearing via chopper. If we consider that area fully covered, that leaves us with two teams, covering one additional direction we wouldn't have been able to before."

"Go on," Allen said with a nod.

"If Kono and that team find nothing at the clearing, I'll send them south to the stream, here, only a half-mile from their position," Chin said, pointing down to the map on the ground. "I propose half of us follow the old trails back toward the falls, because Danny _may_ return there if he's the only one functioning. He'd know how to find the trail from that location; Steve wouldn't have taken him any other way than the main one."

"And the other half of my team," Allen concluded, "would go east along the stream."

"Exactly," Chin nodded. "Steve may head downstream to put distance between himself and the clearing, or he might also head back upstream to the falls to catch the trail. That is, if they don't push _through_ the stream, which is what Kono will be looking for. If she finds nothing there, I'll get them back in the chopper to give us air support in case Steve chooses due north, past this next mile of clearing and then deeper into the jungle."

"I'm on-board," Allen said. "All right, everyone, come on, gather round, time to get your marching orders."

Chin watched as Commander Allen and his ten men and women, combined with eight local Search and Rescue men and the four cops from Haluua, gathered together in a large huddle. He heard Allen begin giving orders and dividing the men and women into the two teams. Chin pulled his cell phone out and speed-dialed Kono's number. He'd already decided he was going to head upstream because _something_ told him that was where they'd find Steve and Danny.

And over the years, Chin Ho had learned to go with his gut.

* * *

Kono and the eight soldiers with her left Captain Griesbach in the pilot's seat of the helicopter, agreeing to split into pairs and check the remaining tents that were standing. She and a guy with MUELLER stitched onto the front of his green camo shirt headed for a still-standing tent about twenty feet from the forest on the northwest edge of the clearing. She took point, weapon drawn, and hesitated with her hand over the flap of the tent. Mueller nodded at her, and Kono whipped the flap back, with Mueller ducking quickly inside, carbine rifle at the ready.

The tent was empty, but there was a mattress on the floor that Kono could see had two indentations in its surface. She stepped closer as Mueller checked the four corners of the tent but found nothing. Just as Kono was about to turn away, she spotted something in the grass between the edge of the mattress and the tent wall, and crouched down to pick it up.

"Quest Bar," she said quietly, rising back to her full height as she read the label. "Coconut Cashew." Her eyes widened as a conversation – if you could call it that – that had taken place in their bullpen only last week came back to mind.

"_Steve, Steven, I'm sorry, but coconuts and cashews do _not_ a meal make!"_

"_It's a protein bar, Danny, no sugars added, highest protein content you can get with the fewest carbs. It'll fill you up 'til we can get a proper meal."_

"_Fill me up? I'm a man who was weaned on homemade lasagna, not a guy who's used to eating twigs and leaves in the jungle, and scorpions in the desert!"_

"_I never ate scorpions in the desert. Tried them once in Bangkok, though…"_

_And a silver-and-blue rectangular object had flown across the room like a missile, thwacking Steve in the breastbone and prompting Danny to do a touchdown dance that had them all in tears from laughing so hard._

"_See, Mr. Bad-Ass SEAL? Don't need a protein bar to up _my_ game."_

"Steve was here," Kono breathed, stuffing the bar into the back pocket of her chinos. She raced back toward the tent flap, but stopped when a hail of gunfire assaulted her ears. She crouched on one side of the flap, Mueller on the other. They nodded at each other and both whipped their sides of the flap back at the same time.

The former camp was in _chaos_, with men and women running everywhere, all of them armed, all of them firing wildly at the chopper and the scattered soldiers looking for cover behind what few trees there were in the clearing.

Kono heard a voice come through Mueller's short-wave. _"Have to take off, I've got damage to the fuel tank!"_ Her eyes widened. The chopper was leaving. She sprinted for the forest closest to their position. When she reached the edge of it, she turned to find that Mueller wasn't behind her.

He was down, writhing on the grass in pain. She pivoted, ran back to him, grabbed him under his armpits and dragged him to the edge of the jungle as she heard the helicopter take off. "Where you hit?" she asked as she deposited him in amongst some low-lying foliage.

"Fucker blew out my _knee_," Mueller spat, "god_dam_mit!"

"All right, hang on," Kono said, holstering her weapon and looking all around for something she could use as a tourniquet. But before she could find anything, Mueller whipped a drab green handkerchief out of a pocket and shoved it at her. She nodded, grabbed it, slid it under his leg just above his left knee and quickly tied it so tight that Mueller yelped as she did so.

"Sorry," Kono said. "I'm getting help out here." She whipped her cell phone out even as the gunfire seemed to move further away from their position, and dialed her cousin.

"_Kono, I was just about to call you."_

"Cuz, we've been ambushed. The chopper took damage to the fuel tank, it had to lift off. Mueller, one of the soldiers, his knee's blown, we're at the northwest corner of the clearing just inside the canopy. We need help _now_!"

"_Hang tight, we're on the way!"_ Chin told her, then she heard him starting to bark orders as she severed the line and stuffed the phone back into her pocket. Creeping forward while Mueller panted in pain behind her, she peeked out from behind a large, flat green leaf, but couldn't see a single soul beyond the tent. The gunfire began tapering off.

Mueller's radio came to life again. _"This is Reagan, we've got four down, I repeat, four down, request immediate evac, over!"_

"_No can do, I've lost half my fuel and any spark from gunfire would turn me into a Roman candle. Get the injured under cover and stay put. You've got UAF teams headed your way, over."_

"_Understood, Captain! Reagan out!"_

Kono took a deep breath and looked back down to Mueller, who'd gone silent and really pale, but was still conscious , staring up at the coconut tree palms overhead. Kono's eyes darted all around, beyond Mueller, still further to where the familiar latticework of a Mangrove tree could be seen about thirty feet beyond their position.

Only something seemed a little off about the greenery at its base and immediately beyond it. Kono frowned. She went back to Mueller, laid a hand on his shoulder and said, "Hang tight, help's on the way."

Mueller nodded, sweat dotting his forehead as he struggled to remain awake. Kono moved toward the Mangrove, and as soon as she reached it, she knew exactly what had grabbed her attention.

The long grass at the base of the tree was completely trampled, and it looked like it had to have been more than one pair of feet that did it. While the area was more than a single set of feet should've trampled, it didn't appear to be big enough to have been more than two or maybe three people.

She touched the tree's latticed trunk and looked to the left. Many of the stiffer leafs and flower stems from surrounding plants were broken off, but in a single line, as though only one set of feet had left the Mangrove.

"Think, Kono," she whispered to herself.

Two or three sets of prints tamping down grass and other foliage near the tree.

One set of footprints, evenly spaced as though the person had been running, leading away.

Two indentations in the mattress of the tent closest to this part of the forest.

Two or more people entered the forest here.

But only one kept going.

Yet there were no bodies anywhere around, and no indication that a full body had fallen and then been picked up.

So…two indentations on the mattress.

Two people entered the forest.

Only one kept going.

Kono snapped her fingers. "One _carried_ the other!"

Which meant one of them was hurt. Quickly she pulled out her cell phone and dialed Chin's number.

"_Kono, we're only about five minutes from the clearing."_

"Chin, get over to the northwest quadrant. You'll find Mueller down here, but I think I may have picked up a trail that I need to follow while it's still fresh."

"_Steve? Danny?"_

"Might be," Kono nodded. "Hurry, Chin."

Before Chin could respond, Kono cut the call off, drew her weapon, and began following the trail that had been left for her to find…whether on purpose, or not. Something told her she _had_ to.

* * *

Steve stumbled. He was getting _tired_ and Junior, as Danny had dubbed the baby, was not enjoying the jostling he was getting held tightly to Steve's shoulder and chest. So far he hadn't started wailing yet, but he was making noises, and for ones in Steve's, Danny's and Junior's current situation, _no_ noises were good.

He finally allowed himself to stop, panting heavily as he crouched and not-so-gently dumped Danny into a bed of uluhe, a plush, green fern littering the forest floor. He was surprised to find Danny's eyes weren't closed; he'd assumed Danny had gone unconscious after being picked up.

"You okay?" Danny asked, and Steve blinked, remaining crouched next to Danny's legs as he, with great effort, pushed himself up into a sitting position.

"Think…I should…be asking _you_ that," Steve puffed, wiping sweat from his brow. He looked down at Junior, who seemed…_off_ to Steve somehow. "Danny…"

Danny looked up at Steve's face, then held out his good hand toward the baby.

"Why'd you go quiet when I…picked you up?" Steve asked between breaths as gently placed Junior into Danny's lap.

"I figured the same principal in not struggling when someone's trying to save you from drowning applies when someone's carrying your ass through the jungle," Danny replied, looking down at Junior and putting the back of his hand against the baby's forehead. "Shit."

"What? What's wrong?"

"He's too hot. It's probably your body heat, the air temp and the onesie combined. We need to get this thing off him, do we have _any_ water?"

Steve shook his head, hands quickly undoing the snaps of the onesie. He pulled the little guy's arms out of it, and helped Danny pull it down and off the baby's legs, then balled up the small bit of cloth and stuffed it into a back pocket.

"We've got to cool him down, Steve."

"Well, we could head directly for the stream, but I really don't want to risk putting that water on a baby that small. Not with the bacterial content."

"You know, he already had it on him once; the falls were spraying both of us." Danny looked up into Steve's eyes. "And I sat right down in the water after catching him."

"I know," Steve replied, understanding by the look on Danny's face that he knew damn well that thanks to the _pike_ wound, he was probably infected already.

"Hey, wait a minute," Danny said, fanning his good hand over the baby's face to try and cool him, "you think this little guy was living in those tents with whoever those people are?"

"It's a possibility. I think they were all Caucasian from what I saw, and he certainly seems to be. The woman who picked him up when we were captured, she had hair colored like his is there on the top of his head."

"So maybe she's his mother?"

Steve shrugged, looking all around them.

"Steve what if Junior's al_ready_ infected?"

Steve's head whipped back to look at his partner. He ignored the dull ache at the base of his skull from having been knocked out earlier. "What?"

"Look, those people are _haoles_, and trust me, I know _haoles_ since I fit the bill," Danny said, still trying to fan Junior's face and body as the infant stared dully at Danny's face. "And the few I saw were paler than me. So that means they might not know about the freshwater here. If they've been drinking it, using it to bathe in, using it in their food, then Junior could already be infected."

"So it might be the bacteria and not the heat that's affecting him," Steve concluded.

Danny nodded. "In which case, the cool water of the stream could only help him at this point."

"All right," Steve said with a curt nod. "We'll head south toward the stream, but I'd rather come in a good distance from the falls."

"Okay," Danny said, then looked down at Junior. "We'll get you out of here, big guy," he said quietly, "I promise you. Uncle Steve and me, we got this."

Steve half-smiled at them as he wiped the sweat off his forehead again. He looked up at the tall canopy trees overhead, down at the mid-level trees, back to Danny and Junior, his mind going through every possibility he could think of to make the next half-to-three-quarter mile trek easier on Danny. And then he heard a sound. His eyes widened; he held up a hand palm-flat in Danny's direction. Danny remained silent.

There it was again. It sounded like a herd of elephants was slamming its way through the overgrowth. "We gotta go!" Steve whispered, rising and taking the baby in his arms as he did. "_Dan_ny," he said, not caring if he sounded like he was pleading.

"I can make it," Danny said, holding his good hand up, a look of sheer determination on his sweat-shiny face.

Steve hiked Junior up against his shoulder again, reached out with his right hand and grasped Danny's, pulling him firmly but as gently as he could to his feet. "Don't let go of me, Danny, whatever you do," he said, squeezing his partner's hand. "I _mean_ it."

Danny's face was twisted in pain like Steve had never seen, but they didn't have a choice here. If they didn't move, their captors would grab them again. Or worse yet, just kill them on the spot.

So Steve took off, not going as fast as he could've without having to keep hold of Danny, but not willing to leave his partner behind. Not to spare his own life, certainly, but not even to spare Junior's, who wouldn't be alive right now at _all_ if not for Danny.

It was the three of them making it out alive, Steve kept telling himself, or it was none of them making it out at all.


	7. Chapter 7

Kono frowned as she came to a ten-foot-square area that was mostly devoid of vegetation. She saw one large set of prints in the ground that seemed to have been made by hiking boots, coming from the trail of broken vegetation she'd been following. But the dirt mixed with rotting foliage on the forest floor showed at least three _other_ sets of prints coming from her right. All prints converged in the small area, and all kept going out of there and back into dense forest.

It didn't take a genius to know what that meant.

But there was something different here, too. There seemed to be a lot of broken uluhe at the base of a tree off to the left, and when she inspected it more closely, she could've sworn she could see a butt print. So…whichever of the men was carrying the other had set him down.

She stepped back and looked at the edge of the green fern bed. _There_! There were _two_ sets of prints coming _out_ of the greenery! So that meant whichever of them was hurt was now well enough to run.

_Thank God_, she thought.

Kono pulled out her phone. She made to dial Chin, but nothing happened. So she took a closer look at the screen and realized she wasn't getting a signal. "Shit," she breathed, putting the phone back into her pocket. She stretched her fingers out from the butt of her weapon, re-gripped it and listened.

She knew now, in her gut, that Steve and Danny – and maybe even a child – had gotten away, and that they were being followed by at least three people. From the sizes of the prints that came in from the east, she guessed two were male and one, female. Which meant the guys were in a whole lot of trouble, even if they _were _doing better physically, and Kono had no way of letting Chin know.

She'd told Chin where she was; he'd find and follow the trail of broken foliage that was so clear behind her. And just to make sure he didn't think _she'd_ been captured here on this spot with all the footprints, she reached inside her shirt, untied her bikini top and hung it on the nearest tree that led in the direction the prints had gone.

Back in the day, that'd been the symbol among her surfing friends not to intrude because someone was on the beach getting lucky.

In this case, she hoped it told Chin that she _had_ gotten lucky…only this time, in locating their teammates.

Kono made sure her shirt was pulled back down all the way, and plunged into the jungle cover. She wasn't being quiet, but if there _were_ cult members after Steve and Danny, better that they turned around to confront her than keep going after the partners when one was most likely injured.

Well, in theory, anyway.

* * *

"Here he is!" Chin yelled, getting down on one knee next to Mueller, who was unconscious. "Get him out to an ambulance," he said to a woman and a man from Commander Allen's team as the group he was with joined him. "He's still got a pulse, but he's lost a lot of blood."

"Where's your other officer?" Allen asked.

"She thought she found where Steve and Danny might be headed," Chin replied, looking up. He saw the Mangrove tree. Saw the trampled grass. Saw broken leaves and branches further along. "This way. Come on."

Allen and the remaining six members of their search team followed as the man and woman Chin had spoken to lifted Mueller and headed back the way they'd come.

"Can Kalakaua handle this kind of terrain?" Allen asked, close in Chin's heels as they plowed through the vegetation.

"She's my cousin," Chin replied. Because for him, that was both the answer to Allen's question, and the prayer that she wasn't going to get herself killed trying to emulate their boss.

* * *

Steve realized after about another mile of running that not only could he hear the trickling of the stream pretty nearby, but that Danny had slowed down so much that Steve was quite literally _dragging_ his partner with him, rather than just hanging on to his hand so they didn't lose each other in the undergrowth.

He stopped, and it was as if that gave Danny tacit permission to collapse. Because he did so with an unmanly, squeaking grunt, right there where the sun was peeking through the treetops…and where, just as quickly, it disappeared as a huge cloud covered it.

"Danny!" Steve whispered, kneeling down next to him. And Danny was awake, but he was in more pain than Steve had ever seen him, gunshot wounds and torn ACLs and all. "Here," Steve said, and used his right hand to pull Danny's legs out straight in front of him. Then he laid the baby, wearing only his little diaper, face-down onto Danny's bare chest and abdomen. He checked Danny's broken arm, which looked like it was still secure in the splint he'd fashioned, and then pulled out his knife.

"You're…gonna put me…outta my…misery now…right?" Danny asked, his voice so soft that Steve almost couldn't hear it over the sounds of the forest around them.

"Not a chance, babe. You're not getting off that easy," he replied, opening the jackknife and quickly slicing through the strips of Danny's tee shirt he'd used to tie the breadfruit sap-laden leaf to Danny's side. "Checking your wound."

"Oh…gr—great…how…baby…?"

"He's lethargic, but conscious. I think you were right before. I think he's infected by Leptospirosis. In fact, all those people might be."

Danny's head, which he'd been trying to hold up, fell to the ground, eyelids opening and closing _very_ slowly. He managed to lift his left hand up and place it palm-flat over Junior's back. "He's…too…too still, Steve."

"I know, I _know_," Steve growled, peeling the leaf slowly away from Danny's clammy skin. And oh, Steve didn't like what he saw.

The area around the wound, though the wound itself was maybe only about an inch of torn skin in diameter, was angry red. Steve noticed something that looked a little off at the top of the wound, nearest Danny's ribcage.

"Shark's tooth," Steve breathed, leaning in for a closer look.

Junior whimpered.

"Danny, I have to take this out, it's trying to wedge itself through as you're moving, but the scab's stopping it."

"Gross," Danny replied, voice only a fraction of its normal volume.

Junior let out a soft cry.

Steve leaned forward, just to Danny's right, and touched the bark of a tall, tall tree. "Koa," he said, then looked back down at Danny's wound. His eyes came to rest on Junior. "All right, Danny, I've got to get some leaves from this tree. They'll help both you and the baby."

"Mm," was Danny's response, hand moving just slightly on Junior's back as the baby cried out again, just as softly as before. "He…baby…Steve…"

"I know, I'm working on it," Steve said, and looked up at the tree. He lifted his foot, unlaced his boot, slipped it off and took aim, throwing it as high as he could. The first branches – and therefore, leaves – of the koa tree were a good twelve or more feet off the ground. The boot arced high into the air, thwacked into several branches, and knocked one whole branch _full_ of leaves right down.

The branch – and Steve's boot – were headed right for Danny's skull.

Steve reached out with one hand and grabbed the branch even as Danny's eyes squinted shut against what he was sure was going to hit it. Steve's other hand caught his boot. Danny's eyes opened and stared at him in disbelief. Steve grinned and winked. "I have my uses, Danno."

"I'll say," Danny replied.

And then the skies opened up.

While the canopy provided a fairly decent cover to getting hit directly with the downpour of rain, the lower half of Danny's body was sticking out from under the shelter of the koa tree, so it started getting soaked.

"Rain. That's good, Danny," Steve said, trying to keep his voice low, knowing their captors were most likely still on their trail. "That's clean water. I'm going to move you, you need to drink it as it falls, take in as much as you can."

Steve lifted Junior off Danny's chest, grabbed Danny's good hand and dragged him away from the cover of the koa. Danny spluttered a bit, but soon he was taking rainwater into his mouth like a fish out of water, and Steve had his head upturned to drink as well.

Then he turned his attention to the infant, who was now just as wet head to toe as Steve's bare upper body was. He caught some rainwater in his cupped hand, rolled the baby slightly and tried to get some into his mouth. The little guy choked a bit, but then latched onto the fleshy part of Steve's hand and tried to suck on it.

Steve grinned and shook his head. He reached out and gathered more water in his cupped hand, held it close, and managed to get a decent amount of it into Junior's mouth without him choking…though the baby was still pursing his lips like he was looking for something specific.

Which, yeah, you know, Steve was a lot of things and knew how to _do_ a lot of things, but, "I don't have the right equipment for that, Junior, I'm sorry."

He heard Danny snort and looked down to where his partner was, actually, looking a lot better now that he was soaked head to toe and had gotten some water in him. "You think he'll get too cold being this wet?" Steve asked as he went back to trying to get fresh water down Junior's throat.

"Probably like before, he'll start shivering, and that diaper's going to get awfully heavy," Danny said in what was his first complete sentence in a bit, and Steve had never heard anything that made him happier.

"We're almost to the stream, but I've got to get that shark's tooth that's trying to poke through your scab out of you first," Steve said, leaning down and placing Junior face-down on Danny's torso again. "It'll hurt."

"Just add it to the list," Danny said with a flap of his hand. Then he lifted that hand to hold it like an umbrella over the baby's head. "Move us out of the direct line of fire first?" he suggested, looking up and taking more rain into his mouth. "Kid's gonna drown."

Steve nodded, and this time he gently pulled Danny back under the koa tree, right next to the trunk. Danny's head came to rest on a small rock that the tree was growing around, and he kept his hand over the baby's head, only to suddenly start squirming…and Steve hadn't even touched his wound yet.

Steve looked up at his face with a frown, and found it all red. His frowned deepened, then he saw Danny's good hand clench into a fist while he kept squirming. And then Steve saw the baby. His jaw dropped. "Is he-?"

"Shut up, Steve," Danny said, then snorted as he tried not to laugh. "He's just getting the water off my skin and if you make some comment about him sucking on my flesh, I will use the shark's tooth from my body to cut your tongue out."

In spite of their predicament, it was all Steve could do not to start laughing his ass off. "As long as he stays away from the nipples, I won't say a word," he said…and then _did_ laugh out loud when Danny shoved the kid's face back toward the center of his chest. "I wish I had a camera."

"You are a dead man."

"Yeah, yeah. Now let me get this tooth out of you."

Steve took one of the koa leaves off the branch he'd knocked loose, sliced it in half and rubbed the blade of his knife with it until the leaf was shredded. Then he stripped another five leaves off and stuffed them into his mouth, chewing as hard and as fast as he could, even as he bent down to look at Danny's wound. Thanks to the rain, the entire area around it was clean, and it even appeared less red than before.

There was the pointed end of the tooth trying to push its way out of Danny. Steve held his knife up, let the rain rinse it, and rubbed his hands together around the knife to try and rinse them off as best he could. "Okay," he said. "Here goes. Stay still."

"I would if this baby wasn't so hungry," Danny said, shoving the kid's head back again as he continued alternately tonguing at and sucking on the water right at the edge of his pec. "_Je_sus, Junior."

Steve smirked, held his hand steady and used the tip of his knife to work the tooth out. When it popped out and into the grass beneath them, Steve picked it up, looked at it and pocketed it. "It's not a real shark's tooth," he said. "It's one of those fakes like you find in the tourist shops."

"Is that a good thing or a bad thing, and by the way, that hurt."

"Good thing, I think." Steve watched as a line of blood started leaking out of the hole he'd created, and then suddenly stopped. "Hang on." He got down on all fours, face as close to the wound as he could get it. "There's another tooth trying to come out."

"Grand," Danny said, then waved his hand in the air. "Have at it, Super SEAL."

So Steve edged the knife into hole. Danny whined a little, but stayed still. Within seconds, the second tooth popped out. "_God_," Danny ground out. "Any more?"

"Not that I can see, but they might keep working their way toward this exit point I've created as we keep moving."

"Shit, we have to keep moving."

"Well, I don't hear anyone following us right now. The rain might be disorienting them, but if we can get to the stream, we can cross it and pick up a trail. I heard a chopper in the distance before. I'm pretty sure Chin and Kono are behind it."

"Thank God," Danny said. "Then let's get the hell out of here before this baby gums every hair off my chest."

Steve snorted out a laugh and picked Junior up off Danny's chest as he rose. Then he spat the chewed-up koa from his mouth into his other hand and held them out toward Danny. "Pain relief," was his explanation.

"After you _chewed_ on them?"

Steve watched as Danny struggled to push himself into a sitting position, then looked up at him forlornly through the rain. "Because I chewed on them. It'll affect you more quickly – just chew them, swallow the juice, spit the leaves out."

"This fucking sucks."

"Language, D, there's a child present."

Danny flipped him off. "Gimme the damn leaves." So Steve did. Danny made a face that told Steve precisely how gross he thought this was, then shoved the leaves into his mouth.

Steve half-smiled as he looked down at the little boy. "How you doing now, huh?" Steve drained the last of the juice from the chewed koa leaves that were in his hand, directly into the baby's mouth. "Better that you've got some water?" He moved his finger to nudge the baby's cheek, and quick as lightning Junior's lips latched onto the end of that finger and he started sucking for all he was worth.

Next thing Steve knew, Danny was standing right in front of them and grinning even though half his face screamed _pain_. "Got your finger, huh?"

"Yeah. That's some powerful suction," Steve said, staring down at the tiny face, currently shielded by Steve's hunched-forward shoulders. "He's cute."

"Babies usually are, although my cousin Marla was an exception to that rule," Danny replied. "At thirty she's still as ugly as she was straight out of the womb."

"You are not a nice person, you know that?" Steve asked, eyes never leaving Junior's face.

"I'm much nicer than my pop. You don't want to _know_ what he says about Marla." Then it was quiet for a while, the rain drumming on the forest around them the only sound as Steve resettled Junior in the crook of his arm.

The baby fascinated him. He'd never held one this young before. "How old you think he is?"

"Probably more than a couple of weeks. His umbilical cord's gone, so…" Danny waved his hand in the air in a see-saw motion. "Maybe a month?"

"Huh," Steve replied.

There was a loud snap behind them, and Steve quickly pivoted. "Crap, here they come." He looked down at Danny. "Can you run?"

"I can try," Danny said, and grabbed Steve's hand without being asked. "Hike Junior up, let's go."

"Steve?" a voice…a very _familiar_ voice…called out. "Danny?"

"Kono?" Steve and Danny said at the same time.

"Guys?"

"Holy shit, Kono!" Danny said, a wide smile on his face as the woman herself emerged from the dense undergrowth. She holstered her weapon and looked at them…then looked at them some more…then blinked.

"I gotta get a picture of this," she said, whipping out her phone.

"What?" Steve asked, perplexed.

"Kono, if I didn't have a hole in my side, I would break that phone on the nearest tree trunk," Danny growled as Kono snapped three photos in rapid succession.

"Blackmail material," Kono grinned, pocketing the phone and closing the distance between them. "Well, we thought you might have a kid with you, but not a baby. Gotta say, Boss, you look good holding one."

And Steve was pretty sure he was sporting some version of Aneurism Face by the highly amused looks Kono and Danny were giving him. Then suddenly Danny hissed air out through his teeth, clutched his good arm over his abdomen and bent forward. Steve used the arm he wasn't holding Junior with to close around Danny's bicep even as Kono moved to support Danny from the other side.

"What is it?" Steve asked.

"Another…ah, _God_…tooth, I think."

"Tooth?" Kono asked.

"_There_ you are," came a man's voice. It made Steve flinch, because he'd heard that voice before.

He, Danny and Kono looked up to find two drenched men and the same auburn-haired woman Steve had seen before, standing there pointing automatic rifles at them.

Steve wanted to kick himself in the ass. They'd stayed in one place too long.

_Fuck_.


	8. Chapter 8 and Epilogue

Chin and the team he was with were making good time. It was easy following the path of human destruction through the jungle. When they broke into a small area where there was no undergrowth, Chin held up a fisted hand, and every team member stopped right where they were. He walked across to a bright splash of pink and blue fabric hanging from a broken-off tree branch.

"What the hell?" Allen said, albeit quietly.

"This is Kono's," Chin said, taking the bikini top in-hand and then stuffing it into his back pocket. "It means she's definitely on their trail." Chin half-smirked at Allen's look of disbelief, then eyed the bed of mostly-broken uluhe at the base of a tree to his left. Finally, his eyes moved to the space directly between the uluhe and the tree where Kono had left her bikini top. "This way," he said with a nod.

"Man knows what he's talking about," Commander Allen said, waving the team forward. "Let's go, eyes and ears open."

Chin led the way back into the jungle, easily following where it appeared several people had already gone. He could only hope that by the time he and this team caught up with _his_ team, they'd all still be okay.

* * *

"We got a little lost in the rain, but the ancients led us to you in the end." The man's voice was hoarse, shoulders slumping as he seemed to struggle to hold the rifle he had leveled at Steve.

Steve angled the side of his body where Junior was nestled into the crook of his arm, away from the three armed people. This effectively made Danny's right shoulder a shield between the guns and the baby. Danny leaned just that much closer, so that his entire right arm was flush with Steve's body. He got exactly what Steve was trying to do, and would do anything to protect the child.

Danny's eyes darted to Kono, who was sharing a look with Steve. He knew those two were cooking something up; he just hoped they gave him enough warning that he'd be a help rather than a hindrance when the time came.

"Give us the child," the man said. His hair was long, at least to below his neck, and his face was lined. Danny guessed he was maybe in his fifties. His eyes were pale blue and he looked…well, _manic_.

Ignoring the pain in his side and still not sure what Steve and Kono might be planning to do, Danny squared his shoulders – keeping the baby firmly ensconced behind his right – and shook his head. "No fucking way. You dropped him over a waterfall, asshole. That means you don't get him back."

"He's my _son_," the man spat, trigger finger moving slightly over the trigger of his automatic rifle. "He is mine to do with as I please."

"Not to murder," Steve said, voice cold and quiet. Danny knew that didn't bode well for the fuckers holding the guns on them. "My partner saved his life. That means he's more entitled to the baby than _you_ are."

Danny struggled to maintain a placid face. He had _no_ idea why Steve was saying these things.

"You're wrong. That child was born to be sacrificed to the ancient gods, to make us well."

Using his right elbow to nudge gently into Steve's ribcage, Danny silently crowed in his mind, _We were right!_ The people from the camp _were_ sick.

"What's making you ill doesn't have anything to do with ancient spirits," Steve countered. "You've been drinking water out of the stream here, right?"

The woman of the group nervously glanced at her leader.

"What difference does that make?" the leader asked, glaring at Steve.

"You can't drink any freshwater in Hawaii, or let it come into contact with any open wounds," Steve explained. "All our freshwater contains a bacteria called Leptospirosis. If you've been here more than a couple days, many of your people could be showing symptoms of the infection already."

"If you don't get to a hospital now," Danny chimed in, "you'll all die."

The woman's eyes widened. Kono saw her chance and took it, darting forward and wrestling the gun away from the weak woman's hands. She went down to her knees with a cry as the leader turned and pointed his weapon at Kono, who now held the woman's gun on him. A stand-off.

"If you don't bring the boy to me right _now_," the leader growled, "this woman dies."

The downpour suddenly stopped, leaving the forest eerily quiet around them, with only the sounds of dripping water and a slightly fuller creek trickling merrily in the distance.

"And if you don't drop _your_ weapon," came a low and quiet voice from beyond the armed men, "then _you_ die."

The leader tried to whirl around, but found himself pelted by rubber bullets from at least six weapons, if not more. The second man dropped his rifle to the jungle floor and held his hands up high, shaking and pale, and Kono trained her weapon at the head of the woman still kneeling before her.

"Cuff them," Chin said to the man behind him dressed in green camos, and suddenly there were at least ten similarly-dressed men and women swarming the scene while Chin and the Team Leader approached Danny and Steve. Kono, as soon as the woman was cuffed, handed the rifle over to a team member and joined her cousin.

"Nice one," Chin said to her, pulling Kono's bikini top out of his back pocket and tossing it to his cousin. She caught it one-handed with a wink and a grin.

"Unbelievable," the military man breathed as he held a hand out toward Steve. "Commander David R. Allen, United States Navy," he said as Steve took his hand and shook firmly. "Lieutenant Commander McGarrett. Nice to meet the man himself."

Steve gave the guy a funny look. Well, to his credit, Danny figured _he_ was probably giving Allen a funny look, too.

"McGarrett. You're a legend in some circles."

Danny managed to roll his eyes in the endorphin rush that came from not having to run for his life anymore, and looked up at Steve who definitely had a weird look on his face now. "Well, uh…thanks, I think," Steve said ever-so-eloquently.

"Want me to handle getting the baby back out of here?" Allen asked, nodding toward where Steve still had Junior, now happily asleep and sucking his little lips into his mouth from time to time, in the crook of his arm partially behind Danny's body.

"No, we got him," Steve said – a little too quickly, Danny noticed – as he moved just enough away from Danny that the baby was in full view.

Commander Allen smirked.

"Just get Danny out to a medic," Steve finished, placing his hand palm-flat over Junior's chest and tummy.

"Like hell," Danny groused. "You think I'm leaving you alone in the jungle with a month-old kid, you're an even bigger legend in your own mind than this guy _says_ you are."

Chin grinned, Kono rolled her eyes, Allen's eyebrows shot up.

"We'll escort the happy couple and their little charge," Chin quipped, prompting Kono to snort.

Allen shook his head. "You have a strange unit, Lieutenant Commander," he said, looking at each of the four adults who, in turn, were all looking at Junior.

"Yeah, but they're _ohana_," Steve replied.

"Looks like _ohana_ plus one, huh?" Kono said, stroking the side of her index finger over the baby's temple. "Our first kid together, Boss?"

Steve snorted.

"No. No, we are _not_ keeping a baby. What, you want him to grow up learning how to chuck grenades before he can walk?" Danny asked.

Allen just shook his head and headed back out the way they'd come.

"Let's take the trails back," Steve suggested. "It'll be easier going on Danny and Junior."

Danny would've made some smartass remark, but suddenly he felt pain piercing his side and jerked to the right in response.

"Holy shit, Danny, are you okay?" Kono asked.

"Steven, I'm giving…birth to…another tooth…" Danny ground out between clenched teeth.

"Here take him for a minute," Steve said, carefully handing Junior to Chin. "Danny needs some help."

"I don't wanna know," Chin said, backing away, his and Kono's attention now fully on the sleeping infant in his arms.

"Cut that hole any bigger than it is and I'll—"

"Yeah, yeah," Steve cut him off. "Shut up and hold still and I might even let you carry the baby part of the way back."

"So fucking – _ow, fuck!_ – magnanimous of you."

Steve held up another fake shark's tooth, then pocketed it. "Come on," he said, holding his hands out toward Chin, who gave him the baby without a word. "Let's go home."

"Whose home?" Danny asked as Steve pressed the hand not occupied with Junior against his wound.

"Mine. Yours. Does it matter? We'll have to take you and the kid to the hospital first. After which, I imagine, you'll be chock-full of painkillers, unable to drive and probably unable to change this bandage with the cast you'll have on your arm, assuming they don't keep you there for a month pumped full of antibiotics, but either way you need to be taken care of."

Danny sighed deeply, shook his head and closed his eyes. "Just because the kid thought I was Mama doesn't make me the girl."

"Nope, it doesn't," Steve said, pulling his hand away from Danny's side and wiping the bit of blood that came with it off on his shorts. "You get to be called Mama because of all the bitching you do."

And so Chin and Kono led the way toward the stream, with Danny following and McGarrett with Baby bringing up the rear.

All in all, as much as Danny was hurting right now, he couldn't be happier. Because he and Steve had saved an infant's life, and in stumbling upon the infant in the first place, had helped lead the local cops and government officials to discovering people where they shouldn't be - violent, screwed-up cult people.

He was tired, he hurt and he was awfully happy to be around a baby again, even under these circumstances. Plus he had at least a week of his partner's grilled steaks and Mother Henning to look forward to once he was out of the hospital. After all, what provided more opportunities for bitching at Steve than _that_? If he had to endure being called Mama, dammit, he was going to play it up but good.

Even though he hadn't enjoyed the trip to a McGarrett Memory very much, Danny had to call the day a win.

* * *

**Epilogue**

_Four Years Later…_

"But Uncle Danny, why can't I go into the water? Gracie's going!"

Danny eyed the auburn-haired four-year old but couldn't keep the corners of his mouth from turning upwards. God, toddlers were a pip.

"Because Gracie is thirteen years old and she's training for the Olympics, Junior, you know that."

Danny looked up at the man and woman seated across the lanai table as Junior – whose legal name was now Daniel Steven Lawrence, courtesy of David and Cheryl Lawrence, who'd adopted him when he was but three months of age – scrunched his face into a scowl.

David and Cheryl both grinned at him. "You know, all he talks about is going into the water with Uncle Steve, and going into Five-0 with Uncles Steve and Danny," Cheryl said, taking a sip from the tall, cool glass of iced tea in front of her. "And something about Uncle Danny's coloring skills comes up at least once a week."

Danny grinned at them. A couple now in their forties, David and Cheryl had tried for years to conceive a child of their own, but had never been successful. So when Five-0 had brought little baby Junior into the hospital, and he'd been placed into foster care after a month recovering from his own bacterial infection, he'd been in the right place at the right time for the Lawrences to open their hearts and home to him.

And they'd named him after the two men who'd saved his life. The Lawrences wholeheartedly made Steve and Danny honorary uncles to the little guy, and the men saw him as often as they could. This weekend was a rare treat: Danny, Steve, Grace and the Lawrence family all hanging out on a quiet Saturday.

"Well, I don't know about a trip in to HQ, but I know Uncle Chin and Aunt Kono are dying to see you."

Little Danny-Steve, as he _insisted_ upon being called after his four-year old brain had processed the story of his infancy as told by two very animated uncles, was pouting mightily as he watched Grace and Steve out in the placid waters behind Steve's house, racing out to some agreed-upon point.

That Danny's daughter was determined to make the Olympic swim team, made him proud. That she had declared just last week that she was _also_ going to become a Navy SEAL, had made him hit Steve in the bicep. Repeatedly. No wonder his hand was killing him.

"I _want_ to _swim_," Danny-Steve pouted, lower lip sticking straight out.

Danny ruffled his short-cropped hair, tilted his chin up, looked into the now-pale brown eyes and shook his head. "Tell you what: I think we need to wade into the water and show Steve and Grace how it's done. What do you think?"

Junior _squealed_ like someone had pinched his bum, and Danny looked up to the Lawrences. "Only if it's okay with your dad and mom, though."

"Oh, _please_, Mommy, _please_, Daddy, let me go with Uncle Danny, _please_? We need to show them how it's _done_!"

Cheryl and David laughed. "All right, sport. Your mom and I will leave you guys to it. We'll be gone a few hours, Danny," David said, rising and reaching across the table to shake Danny's hand.

"We can't tell you how grateful we are that you'll watch him for us," Cheryl added as she moved around the table to give Danny a hug. "The military funeral we're attending is no place for this rambunctious little boy."

"No kidding," Danny grinned, returning the hug with fervor. "And no problem. You know we're pretty attached to this little man."

"And he's luckier for it," David said. "A hug for Daddy?" he asked, squatting so he was on Junior's level.

Junior grinned and hugged David, then Cheryl, then hurried to take Danny's hand and started dragging him toward the water.

Danny chuckled, waving at David and Cheryl as they went back into the house to make their way through to the front door.

"Okay, Junior, got your floaties?" Danny asked.

"Yep!" Junior replied, showing Danny that they were firmly around each of his upper arms.

"All right, then, here we go," Danny said, taking his shirt off and chucking it on one of the beach chairs. He took Junior's hand and slowly they started walking into the water.

When he looked up, it was to find that Grace and Steve had stopped quite a ways off-shore. They appeared to be standing on the sand bar that was, at times, barely a foot below the water. He waved out to them. They waved back and dove into the water headed directly for Danny and Junior.

Well. In spite of the fact that both Danny and Junior had gotten really sick from Leptospirosis four years ago, and in spite of the fact that Danny's right forearm now joined his knee in predicting when storms were on the way, and in spite of the fact that all but two people from the forest cult – Junior's mother and father included – had died from their bacterial infections, the people Danny loved had come through the whole ordeal okay.

Junior had a real family now that would always love him and never hurt him. He wanted to swim and play football like Uncle Steve, learn numbers like his accountant father, sew pretty dresses like his tailor mother, and learn to cook like his Uncle Danny.

Grace had a little 'cousin' she loved mommy-ing, and Danny and Steve, for their part, got to be the bickering uncles of a boy they both cared about a lot more than they'd ever admit to anyone…even themselves.

**Th-th-th-that's all, folks!**

* * *

_Author's Note: Thank you everyone for sticking with me through this one! I appreciate the reviews very much! I will be taking a bit of a break from Five-0 fanfic as I turn my attention toward the writing of my next original novel, "Takers III" - if you'd like to have a look at the first two novels in the series, where you can also get a preview of them to see what you think before you buy, search either Amazon DOT com or Smashwords DOT com for "Takers Chris Davis" and they'll pop up. I shall be back to Danny and Steve as soon as Kel and Levi and Ray and Jess (my original characters in "Takers") get themselves out of their next pickle!_


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